Publication Process

The publication process includes post-acceptance and production.

The point of contact during post-acceptance is the journal editorial office.

Geology: geology@geosociety.org
GSA Bulletin: gsab@geosociety.org
Geosphere: geosphere@geosociety.org

After acceptance, the journal editorial office will contact the corresponding author to request the material and information necessary to proceed with publication.

Each accepted manuscript is copyedited for clarity, style, and consistency.

The managing editor will send the copyedited manuscript text (PDF of the Word doc) to the corresponding author by email. The corresponding author must:

• Clearly answer every question in the edited proof.
• Provide final high-resolution figures (see Figure Guidelines for more details on figures).
• Provide final Supplemental Material.

The managing editor will incorporate changes and clarify corrections with the corresponding author if necessary. The manuscript should no longer be edited by the author in the original Word document.

The managing editor will send proofs (copyedited manuscript in layout including tables/figures) to the corresponding author by email. The corresponding author must:

• Check that any corrections you sent earlier have been made properly.
• Check that author names and affiliations are listed correctly.
• Check for changes in the figures due to software conversions.
• Check to make sure figures are oriented correctly and that captions are with the appropriate figures.
• Check to make sure any special characters were not lost due to software conversions.
• Check tables since they are reset for publication.

The proof stage is not the time to make extensive corrections, additions, or deletions.

The managing editor will incorporate changes and clarify corrections with the corresponding author if necessary. At this point, the layout is fine-tuned.

Once the proofing process is completed, the paper will be posted online. This is the article of record. It will not include a volume number or page numbers but it can be referred to by its DOI number.

The final proof will be assigned to an issue of the journal and published in print for Geology and finalized online for GSA Bulletin and Geosphere. Due to the volume of papers that GSA publishes, this can take from one month to a year.

GSA is a member of Crossref (https://www.crossref.org/ ), depositing comprehensive and accurate metadata from its journals and books and registering Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for all content using the Crossref System.

GSA participates with CLOCKSS (https://clockss.org/), a dark archive that preserves open access and subscription publications with the goal of maintaining access to the scholarly publications it stewards despite any technological, economic, environmental, or political disruptions and failures. The archive uses the open-source technology of LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe; https://www.lockss.org/). All GSA journal content is archived with CLOCKSS.