Geodynamica adheres to the Core Practices recommended by COPE, which apply to the journal team members, authors, and reviewers.

Allegations of misconduct

Geodynamica's Steering Committee will respond promptly when ethical concerns are raised with regard to a submitted manuscript or published paper. All instances of reported unethical behaviour in publishing, including those identified long after the publication date, will be investigated. Acts such as plagiarism and the publication of duplicate content are unequivocally regarded as misconduct. 

Plagiarism

Research submitted by the author(s) must be original. Relevant other works must be appropriately cited or quoted. Manuscripts are systematically checked for plagiarism using appropriate software.

Plagiarism is defined as the use of any materials (e.g., text, data, figures) or ideas developed or created by (an)other person(s) without acknowledging the original source (modified from the Publication Ethics of Solid Earth).

Ethical Practice

It is the responsibility of the author(s) to ensure that all research was undertaken following appropriate ethical practice, any fieldwork and sample collection were carried out in line with local codes of practice, and that permissions were granted by relevant bodies where appropriate. An “Ethics statement” is required to confirm that proper protocols and permissions have been followed. For example, if relevant, this statement should indicate sampling and site access was permitted and followed appropriate codes of practice.

Authorship Definition

Authorship confers credit to substantive intellectual contributions and implies responsibility and accountability for published work. 

To specify the contributions authors can make to a manuscript, Geodynamica uses the authorship roles defined in the CREDiT system. In order to qualify for authorship of a manuscript, an individual needs to have contributed to the manuscript in at least two different roles:

• Conceptualization of the study: Formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.

• Methodology: Development or design of methodology; creation of models.

• Software: Programming and software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.

• Validation, Verification, Replication & Reproducibility: As a part of the activity or separate, of the methodology, results, or experiments and other research outputs.

• Formal analysis: Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesise study data.

• Investigation: Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.

• Resources: Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.

• Data Curation: Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later reuse.

• Writing - Original Draft: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).

• Writing - Review & Editing: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre or post publication stages.

• Visualisation: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualisation and data presentation.

• Supervision: Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.

• Project administration: Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.

• Funding acquisition: Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.

A statement on author contributions following this system is mandatory for any publications in Geodynamica. Contributors who meet less than two of the above criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors. Instead, their contributions should be acknowledged in the Acknowledgements. 

First authors (also main authors or leading authors) are individuals who conduct the majority of the work. First authors are responsible and accountable for the parts of the work they have done; are responsible for identifying who meets the criteria for (co-)authorship and should know which authors are responsible for other parts of the work; and should ensure the integrity of the contributions of the author team. 

A corresponding author is the individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process. At the time of submission, the corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that the author's contributions are accurate and the manuscript version is agreed upon by all authors. After publication of the manuscript, the corresponding author remains available to respond to enquiries and critiques on the work and fulfil any requests for data or additional information. 
Authorship definitions

Complaints & Appeals

If authors wish to discuss the final decision regarding a submitted manuscript, they are encouraged to reach out to a member of the editorial team or core team who was not involved in the initial assessment of the manuscript. The correspondence should be clearly marked as ‘Appeal’ and contain a letter outlining the reasons for their discontent. The appeal will then be handled by the editorial team on a case-by-case basis, excluding the editors who were involved in the original decision.

Conflict of Interest

Authors must disclose and acknowledge any and all funding sources relevant to the publication of the manuscript or the content therein.

Authors must disclose any conflicts of interests or competing interests relevant to the submitted manuscript. 

Conflicts of interest for authors occur when professional conclusions regarding the complete and objective presentation of research are influenced or could be influenced by a secondary interest. Competing interests often arise with regard to financial matters, but they can also be non-financial, professional, or personal and can exist in relation to institutions or individuals (modified from Competing Interests Policy of Solid Earth).

Data & Reproducibility

Beyond the journal article itself, data sets, codes, samples, etc. are an integral part of research output. When combined, they guarantee integrity, transparency, and reproducibility. Therefore, Geodynamica strongly encourages that all materials required to reproduce the study (e.g., source code, input files, databases, etc.) are made publicly available in public/open repositories (e.g., Zenodo), ideally prior to the publication of the manuscript, thus, enabling the citation of their unique digital object identifiers (DOIs) in the published manuscript.

Authors are required to provide a “Data Availability” statement outlining how the used data and methods from the study may be accessed. If multiple data sets are deposited in different repositories, this needs to be indicated in the data availability section. If data or methods from a third party were used, this needs to be explained and the sources need to be cited. 

If any data or methods are not publicly accessible at the time of publication, the “Data Availability” statement should describe why; where and when it might appear in the future; and provide information on how readers could potentially access the data and methods before that time.

Ethical oversight

Geodynamica will take reasonable steps to ensure that publications avoid inflammatory language and do not disclose data that would violate an individual’s privacy. Personal data collected during the editorial process, beyond a paper’s bibliographic metadata, will be kept confidential.

Governance & Constitution

Geodynamica's governance structure are described in the Journal Structure.

Intellectual property

Geodynamica publishes under the Creative Commons license CC-BY 4.0. The journal is Diamond Open Access (DOA), it charges no fees for authors nor for readers, and no article processing charges (APCs).  There is no restriction on pre-printing of submitted papers in public repositories, such as EarthArXiv or departmental websites.  Authors may deposit all versions of their article, including the submitted version and the accepted version, without embargo, provided that they indicate the DOI/URL of the original article.

Journal management

Geodynamica is a community-led journal, entirely managed by volunteers from the geodynamics community and benefits for the support of its publisher: eScholarship (Open Access Publications from the University of California).

Future Revision of Guidelines

As Geodynamica evolves, it will be necessary for us to be flexible. For this reason, our policies are subject to change without notice. We will do our best to include the broader Geodynamica community (authors, reviewers, readers) in these discussions and to keep them informed of any changes in policy. Such policies will not take effect until after they have been updated on the journal website. Any changes should be aligned with the journal ethos.

Peer review processes

Geodynamica strives at making the peer review process as transparent and as fair as possible. The full review process is detailed in the Editorial Process page. 

Comments & Replies

In order to facilitate open and continued dialogue from the broader community, Geodynamica welcomes the submission of comments to any publication. The editorial team will determine whether the comment adds value to the dialogue, and will render a decision whether or not to include it alongside the published manuscript and the solicited review(s) posted on the journal website. Comments are sent for peer-review, and are published by the journal as a peer-reviewed commentary. Comments are submitted to the normal manuscript submission system. A peer-reviewed formal comment that is considered for publication will be sent to the authors of the original manuscript, they will be given the opportunity to reply. The editorial team will set a deadline for receipt to ensure prompt joint publication of the comment and reply. If a reply is submitted, the editorial team will have the reply reviewed as well. Once the decision to publish comment and reply is made, both will be published jointly and linked to the original manuscript.

Publication schedule

The journal publishes one volume per year. Each volume is made of two issues.

Long-term Archival

All materials published in Geodynamica are automatically deposited by eScholarship in CDL's Merritt Preservation Repository for long-term preservation.

Editorial Policy License

The above policy document published on this web page (including all past, present, and future versions) is hereby released for general use under the CC-4.0 license. It may be freely copied, in whole or in part, by anyone, with or without attribution. We encourage other new diamond open access journals to freely make use of this document to help draft their own policies.