Last summer (2019), with a few colleagues, we have started working on open access (OA) practices in geochemistry. We have gathered a nice manuscript we wanted to be published in Geochemical Perspective Letters (GPL), why? Because, it is one of the only Diamond OA journal in geochemistry (with zero article processing charge)!

Early December 2019, we have shared our preprint on EarthArXiv.

We simultaneously submit it to GPL, one week later we have received

« The GPL Editorial Board has reviewed your submission and discussed whether it is appropriate to publish it in Geochemical Perspectives Letters. We very much value the work you have invested however I regret to inform you that the Editorial Board has decided that this article does not fall within the scope of GPL and that, at this point, we should not publish policy, review, position or editorial pieces, but only articles related to novel research in geochemistry. »

We then submit it to Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta and a few days later we have received quite the same answer from Editor in Chief

« Thank you for your submission to Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. After initial evaluation the Editorial Board has concluded that this paper is better suited for consideration by another journal, and is therefore being returned to you without external review. Please see below for additional comments. « 

We thus decided to submit it in a general journal Heliyon where we used to publish, it was published early March 2020 !

But the interest of preprint, is that our paper was read! And I received two simultaneously invitations to write a blog post for EAG and an opinion piece for Elements.

The blog post was published early January 2020 here.

The opinion piece was published in February 2020 issue of Elements (Triple Point section).

I was further contacted by the editorial board of Results in Geochemistry that wanted to publish our article. Unfortunately, we have to decline as it is already under consideration for another journal, but they invite us to write a short communication on that OA practices in geochemistry. What we did, here is the result of our just submitted paper on what we can learn on OA from articles published in geochemistry journals in 2018 and 2019: the growth of open access publishing in geochemistry . It has been accepted on May 14th. Final version is available here!

I was further invited to submit our paper to F1000 Research but also have to decline.

Eventually, thanks to that preprint I was invited to join the Editorial Board of Geochemical Journal and Results in Geochemistry!

I do not count contacts via email, twitter,… with suggestions for improvement.

And last but not least we published a letter on the use of preprint in geochemistry.

Not that bad!

References

Pourret, O., Global Flow of Scholarly Publishing And Open Access. Elements 2020, 16 (1), 6-7. doi:10.2138/gselements.16.1.6.

Pourret, O.; Hursthouse, A.; Irawan, D. E.; Johannesson, K.; Liu, H.; Poujol, M.; Tartèse, R.; van Hullebusch, E. D.; Wiche, O., Open Access publishing practice in geochemistry: overview of current state and look to the future. Heliyon 2020, 6 (3), e03551. doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e03551.

Pourret, O.; Irawan, D. E.; Tennant, J. P., On the Potential of Preprints in Geochemistry: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Sustainability 2020, 12 (8), 3360. doi:10.3390/su12083360.

Pourret, O., Irawan, D.E., Tennant, J.P., Hursthouse, A., van Hullebusch, E.D., 2020. The growth of open access publishing in geochemistry. Results in Geochemistry: 100001. doi:10.1016/j.ringeo.2020.100001.