Geosphere

Submission, Review, and Acceptance

Submission Process

The manuscript submission process is broken into a series of 4 screens that gather detailed information about your manuscript and allow you to upload the pertinent files. The sequence of screens are as follows:

1. A form asking for author, title, abstract, and file quantities. (It will ask for corresponding author first, contributing authors later. The corresponding author does not need to be entered again as a contributing author.)
2. A screen asking for the actual file locations (via an open file dialog). After completing this screen, your files will be uploaded to our server.
3. A task screen where you will be asked to create a merged PDF for the convenience of the reviewers and editors. Please select the files that should be included and enter the order (these are text, table, and figure files; cover letters and supplemental files will be automatically excluded).
4. A completion screen that will provide you with a specific manuscript number for your manuscript (please keep this for reference). This page will also allow you to review your converted manuscript. If the conversion is not correct, you can replace or delete your manuscript files as necessary. After you have reviewed the converted files, you will need to click on "Approve Converted Files" to officially submit the manuscript. This link will have a red arrow next to it. Throughout the system, red arrows reflect pending action items which you should address.

Please upload your text and figure files separately. We will need your text file (original word processing file in Word, Word Perfect, wpd, or rtf) in order to copy edit your manuscript should it be accepted. Our system will automatically merge the text file that you upload with the figure and table files, to make one article file PDF. This allows editors and reviewers to view and/or download your manuscript in one easy step. If any of your figures are illegible, or the merged file size is too large (see below), your submission will be returned to you so that you can fix these problems. Your manuscript will only be considered officially submitted after it has been approved through our initial quality control check, and these problems (if any) have been fixed.

Before submitting a manuscript, please gather the following information:

• All Authors
  • First Names, Middle Names/Initials, Last Names
  • Postal Addresses
  • Work Telephone Numbers
  • E-mail addresses
• Title and Running Title (you can cut and paste this from your manuscript). Your running title will appear as the header on every other page of the PDF.
• Abstract (you can cut and paste this from your manuscript)
• Keywords
• Manuscript files in PDF, Word, WordPerfect, text, or RTF format. (Please include your abstract and figure captions in the text file.)
• Do not use the text option if you have used Greek letters, special characters, superscripts, or subscripts in your paper.
• If you are submitting your manuscript as a PDF, please also upload just the text from the original word processing program (Word, WordPerfect, Text, or RTF format). We may need it to copy edit your manuscript. To do this, upload your PDF as the article file, and your word processing file as a supplementary file.
• Files over 20 MB may cause problems for editors and reviewers. If you have files over 20 MB, please contact before submitting your files.
• Table files in Excel, tab separated format, or comma separated format, or at end of text file.
• Figure/Image files in TIFF, GIF, JPG, PDF, Postscript, or EPS format. They should be in order and clearly labeled. We are now accepting Corel Draw files, however conversion to PDF may take longer for these files, and fonts must be embedded for conversion to take place.
• Figures at this stage do not need to be publication quality, but it is always a good idea to start with publication-quality figures and then save them in the formats allowed by this system. See guidelines about publication-quality figures.
• Geopshere encourages the use of additional types of files, such as animations, video files, data sets, interactive files, and others. These items will not be part of the article file PDF, but reviewers will have access to them.
• Contact information (e-mail address and institution) of desired peer reviewers (if any).

Supplemental Files

One of the goals of Geosphere is to provide a venue for innovative papers and materials that don't fit into traditional print journal formats. Here are some examples:

• Animations or movies videos submitted as mpeg files
• Maps with layers that can be manipulated, submitted as Adobe Illustrator files.
• Large format maps
• Interactive website (self contained files viewable by any web browser)
• Large numbers of color figures. We prefer the following image file types, in order of preference: JPEG, TIFF, GIF.

The supplemental files should be in a format that does not require proprietary software or in a format that has a downloadable free viewer. Free viewers exist for Microsoft Excel for Windows; Adobe PDF ; and Postscript.

If you have questions about special file formats you want to use in your submission, please e-mail editing@geosociety.org with the details.

Resubmissions

If you are resubmitting a manuscript, please note this fact in both your cover letter and the "Manuscript Comments" at the bottom of the first submission screen. If you know it, please also include the original manuscript number.

top