A new year sees a new look for the Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society and a refreshed Editorial Board (see inside front cover) that addresses a gender and age imbalance among the editors. The changes are more than just cosmetic, but reflect a vision for the future of the Proceedings in terms of content, aim and editorial commitment.
Historically, as described on its Lyell Collection page, the content of the Proceedings has ‘focussed on the geology of northern England and its neighbouring areas’, and therein lies both a strength and a weakness. The strength is that the journal provides a ready home for papers dealing with the geology of the region. The weakness is the geographical association, which I suspect has almost certainly discouraged some potential authors. The inclusion of ‘neighbouring areas’ does little to rectify this perception, and a quick look at the contents pages of recent parts will show that the majority of papers have emanated from research on the geology of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Cumbria and Northumberland, with the occasional foray southwards as far as East Anglia. This part is no exception.
The geology of northern England records events from the piecing together of Palaeozoic terranes that now form the foundations of the region to the glacial, peri-glacial and post-glacial processes of the Quaternary, and historically has been a test bed for the development and refinement of geological ideas. That is still the case today and there is, without doubt, much more that can be learned as new techniques are applied. The journal will always have a proud association with the geology and geologists of the north of England and will, I hope, always be seen as a natural home for papers on the region. Nevertheless, as research shifts focus, so too the journal needs to develop if it is to have a sustainable long term future.
How do we address this? The new Editorial Board has a role to play in developing the journal, being pro-active, for example, in encouraging submissions. Beyond that there is perhaps a need to define more explicitly the aim of the journal and the niche that it occupies in geological publishing. Regional data are the staple of papers submitted to the Proceedings, whether at outcrop or basin scale, and will continue to be so. They can range from a new record of a particular mineral at a single locality to patterns of sedimentation within a basin. ‘Regional Geology’, the first element of the new strapline, defines what we publish, with the emphasis being on the regional aspect rather than on the region itself. While northern England will remain the journal's core area, this need not or should not exclude submissions from elsewhere.
Our ambition must be that such data feed into a broader picture, the ‘Global Impact’ that is the second element of the strapline. There are plenty of opportunities for papers with a regional focus to have a global reach. An example published in this part of the Proceedings is Malcolm Hart's paper on the Black Band, the local representation of a world-wide oceanic anoxic (Hart 2019). In order to realise this, however, papers published in the Proceedings need to be read and cited as widely as possible. There are two big developments on the horizon that might help to bring this about, although neither is without significant challenges.
The first is Plan S, an initiative launched in September 2018 and supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders, including those in the UK. Plan S requires that, from 2020, papers resulting from publicly funded research must be published in compliant Open Access journals or on compliant Open Access platforms. There are implications arising from this for journals such as the Proceedings, around achieving compliance for example, but there are also opportunities if the difficulties can be overcome. Open Access would mean, for example, increased visibility on publication for papers published in the journal. Furthermore, journal Impact Factors, which have often influenced the choice of vehicle for publication, would become less important. Research would be assessed on its own merits rather than where it is published, one of the intentions of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which cOAlition S supports.
The second development links to ambitious proposals for the way geological data are accessed globally, taking the regional data published in journals such as the Proceedings and enabling their integration with other data sets to contribute to a bigger picture. Historically, the discoverability and interoperability of geological data have been limited because they have been scattered through the literature or on isolated platforms. Now, projects such as the GeoBioDiversity database (GBDB, http://www.geobiodiversity.com/) and the Deep Time Digital Earth (DDE) project (http://iugs.org/uploads/Reports/IUGS_Deep_Time_Digital_Earth_Launched.pdf) show ways in which the regional data published in journals such as the Proceedings can attain wider impact.
Much more needs to be done to make the ambition reality, but the Yorkshire Geological Society is fortunate in having the support of the Geological Society of London and staff at the Geological Society Publishing House in the development of the journal. Meanwhile, the reinvigorated style and new, more diverse Editorial Board show an editorial commitment to maintaining and enhancing the scientific standing of the Proceedings for the foreseeable future.
- © 2019 The Author(s). Published by The Geological Society of London for the Yorkshire Geological Society. All rights reserved
