The launch of Seismica: a seismic shift in publishing

Seismica, a community-run Diamond Open Access (OA) journal for seismology and earthquake science, opened for submissions in July 2022. We created Seismica to support a shift to OA publishing while pushing back against the extreme rise in the cost of OA author processing charges, and the inequities this is compounding. Seismica is run by an all-volunteer Board of 47 researchers who fulfil traditional editorial roles as well as forming functional teams to address the needs for technical design and support, copy editing, mediaand brandingthatwouldotherwise be coveredbypaidstaffatafor-profitjournal. We aresupportedby the McGill University Library (Québec, Canada), who host our website and provide several other services, so that Seismica does not have any income or financial expenditures. We report the process of developing the journal and explain how and why we made some of the major policy choices. We describe the organizational structure of the journal, and discuss future plans and challenges for the continued success and longevity of Seismica.


Introducing Seismica
Seismica is a Diamond Open Access (OA) academic journal for the broad disciplines of seismology and earthquake science, and related education and outreach. Diamond OA means that it is free to read and free to publish. We launched Seismica because of the inequities in the current publishing landscape, and the increasing costs of access to research for both authors and potential readers of scientific papers. The shift to OA requirements in many countries has exacerbated biases in access to publishing, compounded the problems with merit assessment and academic competition, and highlighted the fact that the costs for Gold/Hybrid OA (author-pays for open access) models are far in excess of the costs of publishing (Khoo, 2019;Björk, 2021) 1 . By returning control of the publishing process to the hands of the research community, we can address local and global inequities in access to research (Khanna et al., 2022). The opportunity to reimagine the publishing ecosystem for our community by developing a new journal with not-for-profit motives, which is designed by and for researchers, has inspired us to volunteer our time for Seismica.
Here, we report the context and our motivation for creating Seismica, describe the journal as it exists at the launch in 2022, and outline our aspirations for building a new kind of scientific community that will support equitable and inclusive global collaboration across our disciplines into the future.

Our Diamond Open Access (OA) publishing model
Diamond OA Journals are distinct from other OA publishing models in that there are no subscription fees for institutions or individuals, nor do authors pay to publish. While Diamond OA journals have always existed, there is a greater interest than ever before in encouraging and developing this model further (Ancion et al., 2022). Lange and Severson (2021) identified 485 Diamond OA journals operating without the support of a commercial publisher in Canada alone. This mode of publishing is already very well established, although most of these journals are small-scale and 76% were in the fields of Social Sciences and Humanities. Khanna et al. (2022) found that Diamond OA journals published more scholarly works from the Global South, demon-strating how Diamond OA expands the global reach and inclusivity of scientific research. Traditionally, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) journals have been smaller players in the Diamond OA landscape (Lange and Severson, 2021;Bosman et al., 2021). STEM disciplines have taken different paths to OA publishing. Green OA involves posting preprint versions of articles (before submission or after acceptance) which is gaining popularity in the Earth Sciences (e.g., EarthArXiv, ESSOAr). However, the high value placed on peer review, fear of being 'scooped', and confusion surrounding preprint restrictions between different journals has prevented Green OA from fully serving the needs of the Earth Science community.
The field of Earth Science produces high-impact research that promises benefits to the public and society. Fulfilling this promise requires an open and inclusive publishing method to effectively communicate scientific results, such as new research on earthquake hazard and its implication for earthquake risk quantification and mitigation. Many professional organizations have produced longstanding publications prior to the consolidation of scholarly journals into a few large publishing companies, that were essentially Diamond OA before the classification existed in its own right (Shipp, 2000). This legacy of accessibility and knowledge sharing is continued by Seismica, joining a growing group of Diamond OA Journals in the Earth Sciences (e.g. Volcanica 2 ; Tektonika 3 ; The Sedimentary Record 4 ; Palaeontologica Electronica 5 ; and several others in planning stages 6 ).

How Seismica began
In November 2020, Springer Nature journals announced a steep increase in article processing charges (APCs) for Gold OA of more than US$10,000 (Else, 2020). This announcement generated reactions among Earth Scientists on social media on a spectrum from amazement to outrage. Many highlighted that such fees were way beyond the means of most researchers. Some seismologists and earthquake scientists on Twitter noted that the Diamond OA journal Volcanica was already in its third year and had been successful, so proposed that something similar should be developed for our field (Figure 1).
From this collective momentum came action. A selfappointed task force of early-and mid-career seismologists, earthquake geologists and geodesists coalesced within days, and began to put together a road map to founding a new journal. This initiative benefited from the desire for positive action and community building that arose during the months of pandemic-related isolation. We created a discussion space in Slack (a free messaging application), open to anyone who was interested, Figure 1 The beginning of Seismica's recruitment of an initial task force to investigate the feasibility of a Diamond OA journal for Seismology and Earthquake Science, November 2020. Légende. Les début de Seismica, avec la constitution d'un groupe de travail initial pour étudier la faisabilité d'un journal Diamond OA pour la sismologie, novembre 2020. Leyenda. El inicio del proceso de reclutamiento por parte de Seismica, de un equipo para investigar la viabilidad de una revista de acceso libre (OA) Diamante en sismología y ciencia de eventos sísmicos, noviembre de 2020. Nota. L'inizio del reclutamento da parte di Seismica di una task force iniziale per studiare la fattibilità di una rivista Diamond OA sulla sismologia e la scienza dei terremoti, Novembre 2020. 図 1 Seismica のタスクフォースは, 地震学分野におけるダ イヤモンド OA 学術雑誌の実現に向けて, 志をともにする 研究者のリクルートから始まった (2020 年 11 月). https://twitter.com/seismo_steve/status/ 1333532526179201027 where over 100 participants debated vigorously about journal scope, article types, open science, communityfocused policies, improving representation, editorial structure, and journal branding (e.g., the journal name and logo). We invited Volcanica's founders to speak with us and pass on their valuable insights. We explored possible institutional support and funding models to discover that several university libraries supported Diamond OA journals for free. We built a mailing list and surveyed our global community on who they were, what they wanted from a journal, and how they might help with it. We established an approach and philosophical basis for founding a new journal with a unique mission. The main findings of this initial task-force are reported by van den Ende et al. (2021).
With our road map in place, we formed an editorial selection committee, and openly invited applications for positions within Seismica. From the over 130 applications received by the September 2021 deadline, we appointed our Management Committee (comprising Executive Editors and Functional Team Chairs), Handling Editors and Functional Team Members. The organizational structure was designed with permeability between traditional editorial roles and the functional teams that run the day-to-day operations of the journal (Figure 2), with individuals opting in or out of finite or open-ended functional roles.
Five task forces (Appendix A), raised from the appointed Board, undertook a 10-month journal building process to prepare Seismica for launch. The task forces were in near constant communication through the Management Committee to integrate our work as a coherent organization. We adapted our initial vision for the editorial structure as we realized the scope of some tasks, like Media & Branding, was larger than anticipated, and added members to certain task forces where required.
A major step toward ensuring Seismica's future was signing a Memorandum of Agreement with the McGill University Library. Like many university libraries in Canada, McGill Library is equipped to support OA journals through the installation and maintenance of the open-source Open Journal Systems (OJS) 7 platform from the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), as well as to train journal editors and guide new journals through customization of the OJS interface. McGill Library acquired an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) for Seismica, assigns Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for all published content through CrossRef, and will also help Seismica to apply for inclusion in indices like Scopus and Web of Science. Critically, McGill Library takes on the cost of these services, through purchasing the services from relevant vendors and through in-kind contribution of the Library and IT staff time. If Seismica separates from McGill Library for any reason, both parties commit to give a six months notice, and Seismica would retain any archives previously hosted on the McGill Library servers. This agreement gives Seismica the stability to ensure that our articles will remain open and available for perpetuity. McGill University Library covers all of the necessary functions for publishing a peer-reviewed journal that would require funding to acquire; remaining functions are supported by the time and expertise of our volunteers.

Seismica's Key Values
Through months of discussion, the character of our community became more distinct and we distilled some common values. These key values (Table 1) form the basis of Seismica's policies, which are implemented as guidelines for authors, reviewers, and editors 8 . This section describes how some of the policies in place at the time of launch implement these values; these values will be cyclically reviewed through new policies described in Section 5.
To create an Accessible publishing venue, we designed a suite of peer-reviewed article types, including traditional research papers, but uniquely, we also offer a Report format designed for: fast publication (e.g., in the aftermath of a significant earthquake); instrument/field deployments; software; null results. We also encourage 7 https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/ 8 https://seismica.org/policies submission of reviews and opinion papers after consultation with the Editorial Board. Seismica recommends that our authors publish their articles under a Creative Commons CC-BY license 9 , and we provide support for authors to help them make an informed choice of CC license if CC-BY is not appropriate for their contribution. We encourage authors to post preprints under the same license at any time from pre-submission up until acceptance (after which it would be redundant). We require authors to make data and code publicly downloadable (not "by request"). We also support the inclusion of multiple languages to encourage global readership within and beyond the research community.
To promote a Transparent scientific process, upon manuscript acceptance and publication, peer review reports and author replies are published alongside articles. Our manuscript template includes the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) 10 to promote recognition and acknowledgement of everyone who contributed to the work, and assist authors in making decisions about authorship.
Our Respectful journal design means that the promotion of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) must form a basis for policy decisions (described further in Section 3.2) and that the community must have a direct and decisive input on Seismica's future development. For example, we discussed peer-review modes at length, with some Seismica Board members advocating for double-anonymous review due to its potential to reduce reviewer bias (e.g. Parks, 2020). Due to concerns about the capacity of authors and of OJS to truly anonymize manuscripts, and wanting not to create deterrents for potential submitting authors unaccustomed to double-anonymized reviews, we implemented a policy of publishing reviews. This and other policy choices will be re-examined in subsequent policy review cycles.
Seismica's Credibility derives from informed and thorough editorial handling by knowledgeable researchers, and through trust in one another and in the organization. Our editorial board is designed to grow along with demand and rate of paper submission, to keep individual editors' workloads lower, and ensure that each manuscript within Seismica's broad scope is handled by someone with meaningful expertise. When Seismica receives a manuscript focused on a specific geographical area, editors will prioritize recruiting at least one reviewer from that area, with the help of author suggestions. This ensures a wider diversity of reviewers and increases the impact of the scientific work. All members of the Seismica community are bound by our Code of Conduct 11 and competing interest policies 12 which are updated regularly to reflect evolving understanding of best practices.
Progressive policies require reaching outside the research community to potential readers who may have an interest in participating or may benefit from publications in Seismica. Seismica publishes multiple language abstracts and are developing author support pro-

SEISMICA BOARD
3-year appointment, renewal based on participation/activity and board needs. Some members serve on specialized teams (green wedges), and some are in the reviewer pool. Team sizes scalable to the number of submissions

S E I S M I C A A M BAS S A D O R S (
grams to facilitate outreach. This also means promoting literacy in Open Science principals within the Seismica community as well as the broader circles of authors and consumers of research. Our biennial review cycle is designed to promote flexibility and adaptability as the publishing climate rapidly changes.

An equitable, diverse, and inclusive journal
Equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) are intrinsic to our motivations in founding Seismica and the desire to address inequities in the scientific community is at the center of Seismica's mission. Inequities are structurally engrained into the culture and practice of scientific research, but the last few years have seen a surge in its recognition and acknowledgement, along with some proposed solutions (e.g. Dutt, 2020;Ali et al., 2021;Liboiron, 2021;Pico et al., 2020). Seismica has ensured its key values align with many of these expert recommendations for institutional change in the academy.
A necessary step to understanding how Seismica can play a role in strengthening EDI, is to identify who Seis-

Progressive
Seismica aims to promote innovation and creativity in academic publishing. We aim to capture more scientific contributions through less-traditional formats such as field campaign reports, null results, and software articles, which may not be accepted at other journals. We will continue to innovate with organizational structure and roles, and share the outcomes of our experiments to accelerate the pace of change. mica represents and who we can serve. Our communities include: members of the Seismica Board (Editors and Functional Team Members, Appendix A); our community of authors and reviewers; and the wider global audience who read either our articles or our publicfacing materials. Ideally, our Board should be a reflection of our community. The variety of essential roles within Seismica and our distributed decision-making by consensus and discussion means that policy decisions reflect the input of senior and junior researchers from across our disciplinary and global spectrum. To know how well the Board reflects the community, we need to understand who we are. Self-surveys during initial development stages provided a baseline for describing the Seismica community (van den Ende et al., 2021). Longitudinal voluntary surveys tracking the composition of the Board and of the reviewer/author community will provide a basis for ensuring that new rounds of recruitment keep the Board aligned with the broader community. A long-term goal is to create opportunities for participation in publishing for members of the third communityinterested readers, professionals in geophysics or earthquake hazard/risk whose employment does not include a publishing mandate but who produce new knowledge and insights, and researchers with relevant expertise who face financial barriers to publishing. Community-run journals using the free OJS platform are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Global South, but the chemical and physical sciences combined make up ∼1% of these journals by discipline (Khanna et al., 2022). Our suite of report types was designed to facilitate participation by recognizing a more inclusive range of contributions. We support multi-language abstracts and encourage authors to provide one or more translations to support local interest in regions covered by their studies.
Seismica's Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) team has the mandate to be everywhere at once -members are distributed on key task forces. Although these individuals have EDI as their formal mandate at Seismica, everyone in the organization shares responsibility for pursuing these ideals and learning from the experiences of others. The dialog between members of different backgrounds and perspectives is ongoing and will continue to drive the evolution of the journal as we mature and grow.

Brand and communications
The success of a journal depends on its ability to attract authors to submit high-quality manuscripts that will build reader confidence in the journal. Authors look for an editorial board which inspires respect and authority, as well as convincing evidence of professionalism in the operation of the journal (Feldman, 2008;Shapiro and Bartunek, 2008). If a journal does not inspire confidence, through demonstration of integrity, authority, and broad-based support, then submissions would not come in, and the journal would fail (Hodgkinson, 2008). Journal branding inspires confidence. Therefore, early in the planning process, we developed a strong vision for Seismica's profile in the research community and for stakeholders outside of academia.
A brand is more than just a name, a logo design, or a clever tagline for our scientific journal. It is everything that encompasses Seismica, how we came to be, who we are, and what separates us from other scientific publications. We take inspiration from our vision, our mission, and the power of our collaboration. We believe that if we can communicate our vision clearly to the public and broader community, people will join us. We want people producing research from all over the world to know and feel that Seismica guarantees an equitable opportunity to publish their research, assuring a fair and open review process regardless of where they come from or who they are. We want to foster a sense of community ownership and loyalty, enough to build a group of ambassadors of Seismica who communicate our values around Diamond OA publishing. Because these values come from our community, they reflect its needs and guide our brand positioning to help attract like-minded researchers and foster their motivation and passion for the type of journal that Seismica aspires to be.

Visual Identity
Practically, the first branding task was to design a logo for the journal. In the Seismica spirit, an open logo design competition led to the submission of 18 logo designs, and the final one, designed by Adam Pascale 13 , was chosen by popular vote. Geophysicist and illustrator Lucía Pérez Díaz 14 volunteered to polish the logo for a variety of uses (Figure 3). The logo represents seismic wiggles with an offset, but it can also represent Earth's topography. The color and design variants of the logo were selected to inspire confidence, invoke both trustworthiness and ambition, and be used across different spaces and themes, such as the various journal branches, websites, and social media pages (Twitter 15 , Facebook 16 , Instagram 17 , YouTube 18 ). Close coordination between the Media & Branding Team and the Standards & Copy Editing Team for the Seismica manuscript formatting, and the Tech Team for the website appearance and functions, have given Seismica a distinctive and recognizable look.

Growing Our Community
It is essential to build recognition and familiarity with Seismica's aims and mission to recruit Seismica Board volunteers, and to inspire authors to contribute their work and reviewers to volunteer their time. Alongside the building of our mailing list, social media ac- counts were opened in the early days of planning for launch. A dedicated team was formed to maintain online communication, entrusted with news, announcements, press releases, promoting the brand, and explaining what Seismica is all about. Our posts take different formats: text, images, and video interviews with Seismica Board members. Videos show the human side of the volunteering team behind Seismica. To date, in total, Seismica has over 4000 followers across our active social media platforms.
To connect directly to the research community, and to potential authors and reviewers, Seismica Board members are continuing to present at conferences (e.g. Funning et al., 2021;Gabriel et al., 2022). These multiformat presentations have allowed members of the Seismica team to talk and answer questions from fellow scientists. Support from the Media & Branding team enables presenters to stay on-message with Seismica's brand and maintain the professional appearance with logos and slide templates.
Currently, our message to the community goes beyond promoting a new journal and guides our path forward. Seismica is the first Diamond OA journal built for and by seismologists and earthquake scientists. Our tagline, Our Seismic Moment, showcases Seismica as an avenue for people who want to drive change and advance research and scientific discovery with genuine openness.

Journal Operations
Seismica uses a suite of technical tools to manage communications, the journal website, editorial workflow, and a reviewer database. We use tools that are free or low-cost, usually open source; and are confident that these tools will remain supported for the foreseeable future.
Our website and paper handling are managed through OJS. Seismica's visual brand identity is built into the public-facing website using a custom Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). While OJS limits customization of the editorial workflow, we have adjusted the settings to suit Seismica's purposes, for example, by updating the list of article components that authors are able to upload to match our needs, and editing the templates for emails used at different stages of paper handling. This simplifies the workflows for authors, editors, and reviewers, creating a smooth experience for everyone who needs to interact with the editorial process.
Where current out-of-the-box OJS functions did not fulfil our needs, our Tech team created purpose-built tools. For example, OJS cannot assign expertise tags to registered users. To help Handling Editors find reviewers, we built an independent reviewer database that allows individuals to register using their Open Researcher and Contributor IDentifier (ORCID) 19 and tag their expertise within Seismica's scope 20 . These pre-defined tags were derived from the keywords mentioned in the journal scope. Our database enables Handling Editors to find qualified reviewers more easily, and contact them based on their ORCID or email address. To ensure privacy protection and GDPR 21 compliance, we do not currently collect personal and/or demographic data that is not already publicly displayed on a user's ORCID profile, except for an email address that a user can optionally provide. By the time we launched, over 200 reviewers had self-registered, providing a large pool of potential reviewers to evaluate the submitted manuscripts.
Although article templates are not required for initial submission, this can speed up the final typesetting process, so we provide templates in L A T E X, odt, and docx formats 22 . We use L A T E X (Lamport, 1985) and Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) eXtensible Markup Language (XML) (Needleman, 2012) to format articles for publication. Seismica L A T E X templates use a custom class, based on the article document class, with simple commands for entering article metadata and incorporating multiple language abstracts and/or a non-technical summary. The submission template includes an anonymous option, which generates a pdf without author names, author contributions, and acknowledgements, even if that information is included in the input T E X file, making it easier for authors to submit their work for doubleanonymous peer review if they choose. The publication template, which differs from the submission template, also incorporates the Seismica logo and colors to tie into the overall visual branding scheme 23 . Author contributions are printed below the list of authors for improved transparency, and volunteer editors' and typesetters' names appear on the first page. The Standards and Copy Editing team has developed tools to automate the conversion from odt or docx files to T E X and JATS XML, using Pandoc 24 and various Python packages. In particular, we try to automate the parsing of in-text citations, as reformatting these from plain text to T E X by hand is very time-consuming. The L A T E X template for article submission can be used for preprints, and is available on Overleaf 25 . Slack continues to be the primary communication medium for internal discussions amongst the Seismica Board and ongoing Task Forces. General announcements can be broadcast to the whole workspace, while editorial and technical discussions happen in private Slack channels. Seismica also has a mailing list 26 where larger journal announcements (e.g., journal launch) are broadcast to more than 500 subscribers (as of October 2022).
Other tools used by the Tech team include Google Docs and GitHub. Seismica's core constitutional documents, including Editorial Policies and Guidelines, are currently maintained in Google Docs, which enable collaboration and edit tracking. Scripts, template, and website files are hosted on GitHub, and the Tech team uses GitHub to track and discuss tech support issues.

Post-launch insights
Seismica has only just launched. To date, we have been open for submissions for about 120 days. We have received on average 2-3 submissions per week. Seismica has been well received in the community, following our high levels of community engagement with our social media and conference presentations. Given these factors, together with a strong uptake with both our mailing list and reviewer database, we consider the launch of Seismica to have been highly successful. There are several early and important insights we have gained from this experience.
Our research community values community-led scholarly publishing. The opportunity to influence the journal incentivizes volunteering efforts. Seismica responds to community needs in all aspects of our design. Our organization is growing according to our mission and philosophy of non-profit motive. We hope our novel peer-reviewed Reports format 27 will gather 23 For both templates, we use the Source-Sans OpenType fonts suite, Latin Modern font for equations, and a 2-column text format for ease of reading (Doumont, 2009) 24 https://pandoc.org 25 https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/seismica/bvnbjbkycdjb 26 https://seismica.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u= 6b3197489014e98f2b3014398&id=b3a5fc0e04 27 https://seismica.org/policies#publication-types more data and insights which might otherwise end up uncredited and in gray literature or unreleased. Our inaugural Board represents a diverse international group of researchers, which connects us to a diverse and international community of authors and readers.
Pre-launch community-building made a big difference in soliciting submissions. We extensively used our outward-facing communications channels during the run-up to opening for submissions to improve name recognition and awareness of our values in the research community. Several authors who submitted papers in the first weeks of Seismica, and reviewers who accepted our requests, announced their participation on Twitter. This early community building is unusual among community-run journals (Lange, 2022).
Researchers can provide the functions a traditional publisher provides. With modern tools and software, along with institutional support, key journal functions, including work that has been traditionally charged for, can be accomplished by the scientific community: • Initial editorial assessment and final decisionmaking • Reviewing manuscripts and coordinating reviewer reports • Transforming research into shareable outputs, for example, through social media • Customising and maintaining a website-hosted publication workflow system • Copy editing, typesetting, and persistent archiving for longevity and stability With the increasing stress on library budgets, supporting community-run OA journals offers an institutional mechanism for addressing the cost crisis in academic publishing (Benz et al., 2022).

Collaborative design of journal policies identifies common values and motivates volunteers. Seismica
Board members shared their own anecdotes and experiences during discussions that helped refine our policies, and doing so created optimism that smart policy choices could ameliorate some of the known general issues with traditional publishing systems, such as the peer review process. Just like every other journal, we are operating in a climate of reviewer burnout, but with shared not-for-profit motives, together with workload tracking and a dynamic organizational structure, we believe that these issues can be alleviated by cultivating a sense of community and a shared mission. This shared design has yielded clear communications and expectations from Seismica.

Future growth opportunities
Seismica's initial few months post-launch have proven successful. Nevertheless, we are acutely aware that as we move past the launch phase, several immediate challenges surrounding the reputation, growth, and sustainability of Seismica lie ahead. Such challenges are common for other Diamond OA journals (Becerril et al., 2021;Bosman et al., 2021;Björk et al., 2016).
First, Seismica must build an international reputation for quality and rigor that meets the expectations of the research community. Our pre-launch information campaigns have been very effective at growing name recognition within the research communities of our Board members. Continued support and article submissions, as well as reviewer engagement, depend on the journal establishing itself as a serious venue for academic research. The success of our launch was supported by the professional reputations of our volunteers (Appendix A), and we have relied on their name recognition to build our own. Seismica will establish itself as a brand that researchers are eager to affiliate with using these approaches: a rigorous and supportive review process led by disciplinary experts will ensure that our published papers are of high quality; the Seismica Ambassador program will inform the broader community of our mission and the issues in the scholarly publishing industry that we can address through community-led publishing; we will continue to visibly evolve our policies to stay on top of best practices in Open Science, EDI, and community needs.
Second, we must be prepared to grow and sustain our community. The excitement of journal-building has motivated generous contributions of time and labor from a large number of people. We need to keep our original community members engaged while also expanding to take up extra workload as submissions increase. We must develop a culture that maintains our mission amidst a growing Seismica Board. Seismica's broad scope with a diverse set of Handling Editors that cover these different disciplines in seismology and earthquake science is more scalable than other structures. Early career researchers (ECRs) make up a disproportionate share of our volunteers; they bring an exceptional energy, responsiveness, and highly relevant skills to Seismica. We recognize and must respond to the need for ECRs to document their professional contributions in a way that supports their career advancement to mitigate the time away from research (Lange and Severson, 2022). We are building collaborations with researchers and experts in scholarly publishing, to inform the documentation of every role at Seismica as an academic and scholarly service to publishing. Many upcoming initiatives will support skills development for scholars across our community, hopefully creating ripples that extend beyond Seismica. These include editorial mentoring (underway), and reviewer and author workshops (in development). Our organizational structure is designed to best utilize the skills and available time from a variety of volunteers with different experiences and at different career levels. By tracking roles, responsibilities and workload, we can take care to avoid overloading individual volunteers, and respond quickly to changing demands. We are exploring ways to appropriately document and express gratitude for service to Seismica, beginning with prominent recognition on the published articles themselves.
Third, we must apply for, and anticipate the potential effects of, listing in scholarly journal indices. The Journal Impact Factor is used in many funding systems as a proxy for quality or value of scientific output, which in-tensifies a number of negative impacts related to competition and assessment of researchers (Casadevall and Fang, 2014;Lariviere and Sugimoto, 2019). Recognizing that potential Seismica contributors are dissuaded from submitting their work to Seismica because the journal is not currently indexed by Clarivate/Web of Science, we will apply for an Impact Factor when Seismica becomes eligible after two years of publishing. We recognize that this may open the gates to new segments of the international research community accessing Seismica as a publishing venue, so we must be ready with a global and knowledgeable Board in place to support these changing needs. We recognize the implications of the misuse of Impact Factor and related citation-counting metrics for scientific assessment (e.g. Aksnes et al., 2019); we prioritize accessibility to a broader author pool in seeking listing, and will not compromise our core values in pursuit of rankings.
Finally, we are aware of our positioning in the landscape of seismology and earthquake science research. As we brainstormed ways to better serve our communities with author, reviewer, and editor support, we recognized how many traditional publishers profit from our voluntary labor and research funds, and that the cost structure has become increasingly inequitable. We also recognize that journals published by professional societies are operating within this cost structure and are passing benefits back to the academic community from their publishing profits. For researchers who can afford it, choosing to publish with professional societies continues to be a positive and ethical use of public research funds. We also want to demonstrate to our scientific community that there is another option which has helped other disciplines -Diamond OA publishing. Changes to funding agency policies increasing the requirements for OA publishing (e.g. cOAlition S; Office of Science and Technology Policy, 2022) can either drive even greater cost increases through Gold/Hybrid OA, or can represent a turning point toward the restoration of community-controlled journals.
We plan to develop specific initiatives for the first 12-24 months of Seismica's operation: • Better promotion of published research: Traditional journals do very little to help authors promote their work after the acceptance notice. Seismica will support authors beyond the date of acceptance, by providing support and tools for outreach, social media and raising the profile of published research. We will also support authors in disseminating their work toward the public and policy makers. • Spreading the word about Diamond OA publishing: The Seismica Ambassador program, due to launch in early 2023, will empower members of the broader research community to understand the publishing landscape and community-based solutions to address it -including researcher-led journals like Seismica. • Advancing open outputs beyond research articles: Seismica will continue to publish research articles while also piloting non-traditional publication types and open options for data, software and code.
• Formalization and documentation of Seismica workflows: We aim to create resilience and consistency in our volunteer-run organization through careful standardization and documentation of workflows, from selecting handling editors, to copy editing, to social media strategies, to recruitment of new Board members. This could be a resource for other startup Diamond OA journals, particularly in STEM where there are fewer community-run examples. • Soliciting helpful and useful reviews: Review quality and tone will be addressed through workshops and explicit messaging, modeling reviewing as a respectful and supportive service rather than a gatekeeping exercise. Reviewer appreciation strategies will support positive experiences for reviewers and maintain our current benefit of reviewer preference over for-profit journals. • Editorial wisdom: Effective and efficient editorial handling can reduce workload throughout the manuscript handling process and result in higher satisfaction for all parties. Our editorial mentoring program, currently launching, aims to support editors with expert advice, opportunity for confidential discussion of decisions, and resources on best practices. • Collecting vital EDI data: In conjunction with our EDI goals, we are considering mechanisms for collecting such data in the future in ways that comply with privacy regulations. • Improving our global social media reach: Seismica is currently active on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, that are most popular in the western world. However, other platforms are equally as popular across the globe in Asia and Africa, such as Sina, Weibo or VKontakte. Seismica plans to set up accounts on these platforms to reach a global audience.
original Seismica Task Force on their experience setting up Volcanica and inspiring us to initiate the Seismica project.