Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 09:44:16 +0100 (CET) From: egu@copernicus.org To: feissel@ensg.ign.fr Subject: New EGU OpenAccess Journal: Ocean Science Dear Colleague We are pleased to announce a new Open Access (or free-to web) Journal with the title "Ocean Science", www.ocean-science.net. The new journal is published by the European Geosciences Union (EGU). It is fully peer-review and aims to publish papers of the highest quality covering all aspects of ocean science. At is core are the areas of ocean science represented at the EGU meeting each year but our aim is to use modern developments in publishing to create an open access journal covering the whole of the field. Papers under review are published in the sister journal "Ocean Science Discussions". This journal is not fully peer-reviewed but it is designed to allow an interactive public discussion of the latest developments in the field. A free alert service can inform you of the papers published in your areas of interest. All papers are available free on-line from the moment of publication. Publication is paid for by a small service charge with no extra cost for colour or additional material such as movies. Paper, bound volume and CD copies are available at low cost. During the initial period there is no service charge. Papers are published with a Creative Commons license which allows any number of electronic and paper copies to me made for non-commercial purposes. The authors and their employers retain copyright. We include some extra details below. Further information, including details on submitting manuscripts is given in the web pages at "http://www.ocean-science.net". We invite you to discuss this new journal with your colleagues and students and look forward to receiving your manuscripts from the start of 1 November 2004. Yours sincerely David Webb and John Johnson Executive Editors of Ocean Science ========================================================= Ocean Science - Further Details Ocean Science (OS) is an on-line international scientific journal dedicated to the publication and discussion of research articles, short communications and review papers covering all aspects of the ocean, its physics, biology and chemistry, its interactions with the atmosphere above and the sediments below. The journal covers instrument development, in situ observations, remote sensing, data assimilation, laboratory, numerical and theoretical studies of: Air-Sea Fluxes Surface Waves Sea Ice Internal Waves Turbulence and Mixing Temperature, Salinity and Density Fields Ocean Currents and Eddies Tides, Equatorial Waves and Mid-latitudes Waves Chemical, Biochemical and Biological Distributions and Transport Chemical, Biochemical, Biological and Physical Interactions Ocean Productivity Ocean Ecology Sediment Processes Operational Oceanography The coverage of the journal is worldwide and includes the deep ocean, the shelf seas and inland seas, now, in the past and the future. By publishing articles freely on the web, the journal aims to make the latest oceanographic developments rapidly available to all people wherever they are. By encouraging discussion of each paper, it aims to raise standards, improve the flow of information, identify the limits to our present understanding and stimulate further effective oceanographic research. Peer Review and Publication Ocean Science is using the two stage publication and open review system developed for the successful open access journal "Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics". A submitted paper initially undergoes a brief access review by a Topic Editor. If successful it is then published on Ocean Science Discussions and sent to two independent experts for formal review. At the same time the alert service informs people worldwide of the new paper and it is open for eight weeks of interactive public discussion. During this period, Referee Reports, when received, Author Comments and Short Comments by members of the scientific community are published alongside the discussion paper. At the end of the period the authors are asked to respond with final author comments. Following this period the original paper and any published discussion remain on-line in Ocean Science Discussions. All are fully citable. The Topic Editor then decides to accept, reject or return the paper for revision in the normal manner making use of both the Referee Reports and the Public Discussion. Once accepted, the fully-refereed final paper is typeset, proof read by the authors and published on the Ocean Science website with links to the OSD paper and discussion. All publications (original and final papers, and the interactive discussion) are permanently archived and remain freely accessible to the public via the Internet. Printed and CD volumes of Ocean Science are also available. Service Charges The cost of web publishing depends primarily on the work needed to convert the authors manuscript and figures into the house style. At present the cheapest option is for papers submitted as latex text and postscript figures. Here the charge is 30 euros per page. Further details are given in the web pages. During an initial period the service charge will be waived. Copyright and Licensing Ocean Science will publish the papers with one of the Creative Commons licenses. Creative Commons have a number of licenses with different options, the one we are using being the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike version. This allows people to make electronic and paper copies and to make use of text and figures elsewhere (i.e. in lecture notes) as long as the original author(s) are cited, it is for a non-commercial purpose and the copies are distributed with the same license. The licence also allows copies of the journal to be stored on mirror servers and archive servers worldwide. The authors keep the original copyright so, if asked, they may give permission for the conditions to be waived. To publish in Ocean Science authors have to agree to this license. They also need to license the EGU to make commercial copies and to give them the sole right to do this for the first three years. This is to allow the EGU to produce the paper, bound volume and CD copies of the journal.