GeoScience Engineering is an open access, peer-reviewed periodical journal aimed at publishing research results in Earth Sciences, Mining and Geological Engineering. The journal is published by the Faculty of Mining and Geology, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic. We aspire to publish high-quality professional articles from all over the world, both from well-established authors and younger researchers. To stimulate international exchange of knowledge and research findings, we provide authors with space to publish their original professional contributions both from the academic and industrial sectors. All articles are subject to a blind review process.

Focus and Scope

We welcome reviews, full research articles, and technical notes focusing on:

• Earth Sciences
• Mining and Geological Engineering

Peer Review Process and Publication Ethics 

All parties involved in the act of publishing: the author, the journal editors, the peer reviewers and the publisher agree upon standards of highly ethical behaviour. We encourage top standards of publication ethics and take all possible measures against publication malpractices.

 

Duties of Editors
Editors are responsible for the following:

• That information pertaining manuscripts are kept confidential.
• That any observed conflict of interest pertaining manuscripts must be disclosed.
• The editor and any editorial staff must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.
• The Editorial Board takes responsibility for making publication decisions for submitted manuscripts based on the reviewer’s evaluation of the manuscript, policies of the journal editorial board and legal restrain acting against plagiarism, libel and copyright infringement.

Duties of Reviewers
Reviewers must confirm the following:

• That all manuscripts are reviewed in fairness based on the intellectual content of the paper regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, citizenry nor political values of author(s).
• Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the editor and excuse himself from the review process.
• Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential. 
• That any information that may be the reason for the rejection of publication of a manuscript must be communicated to the Editor.
• Reviews should be conducted objectively.
• Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors.

Peer-review process
All manuscripts sent for publication in our journal are strictly and thoroughly peer-reviewed by experts. The Managing Editor of the journal will perform an initial check of the manuscript’s suitability upon receipt. The Editorial Office will then organize the peer-review process performed by independent experts and collect at least two review reports per manuscript. The reviewers are recommended by the members of the Editorial Board. The standard due date for a review is 21 days after the reviewer agrees to review. When revisions are recommended, the authors are asked to revise the manuscript, taking into account the reviewers' comments, and upload the revised file within 10 days. The final decision is made by the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. Accepted articles are copy-edited and English-edited for free. The time from submission to publication is from 3 to 5 months, in dependence on the number of review rounds.

Duties of Authors 
All authors must confirm the following before the submission of the manuscript:

• All submitted manuscripts must be original work that is not under submission at another journal.
• Only unpublished manuscripts may be accepted for the review process. 
• There should be no conflict of interest. 
• Authors should acknowledge the sources of data used in the preparation of the manuscript.

The authors are encouraged to suggest suitable reviewers for their papers.

Preparing for a Double-blind Peer Review

Please follow the instructions below to ensure the integrity of the double-blind peer review:

• The authors of the document should have deleted their names from the text, with "Author" and year used in the references, instead of the authors' name, article title, etc.
• With Microsoft Office documents, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file.
• With PDFs, the authors' names should also be removed from Document Properties.

Malpractice Statement

The Editor reserves the right not to publish papers inconsistent with journal's ethics. The Editor may retract a paper in case of serious misconduct, including data fabrication, data falsification, and in cases of serious plagiarism. The GSE guidelines build on COPE Principles of Transparency and Best Practice Guidelines and COPE Code of Conduct (https://publicationethics.org).

When authors or third parties identify errors or inaccuracies in their published work, it is the authors' responsibility to notify the editor and cooperate with the editor to correct or retract the paper.

Plagiarism check before publication
GeoScience Engineering subjects submitted papers to a Crossref Similarity Check (powered by iThenticate). If plagiarism is detected at any stage before publication of a manuscript, the article may be rejected. The authors take full responsibility for the contents of their articles. 

Concurrent submissions

To ensure diversity in opinion and to give the opportunity to publish their work to a wide number of authors and teams, GeoScience Engineering limits each author to two papers submitted to a review process concurrently.

Copyright Notice

The authors publishing in GeoScience Engineering agree to the following terms and conditions: 

The authors retain the copyright and grant the Journal right of the first publication with the paper simultaneously licenced under a  Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in GSE. The authors may arrange an additional agreement for the non-exclusive distribution of the Journal's published version of a paper, always acknowledging the initial publication in GSE.

Publication Frequency

It is published exclusively in English, 2x a year (June, December).

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

All manuscripts are published free of charge.

 

Abstracting & Indexing

By sending their papers to GeoScience Engineering, the authors agree to electronic archiving of their papers in GeoScience Engineering journal and VSB-TUO university repository dspace.vsb.cz/handle/10084/83566.

The articles published in GeoScience Engineering are indexed in the following databases/ resources:

• Current Geographical Publications
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• EBSCO
• Google Scholar
• ProQuest
• WorldCat (OCLC)
• Index Copernicus

Journal History

GeoScience Engineering has been published online since 2007. In 2015 the journal was put into operation under Open Journal System that contains archives from 2013. Older articles are available at the old journal pages here: gse.vsb.cz/old