Q&A

• "Progress in Earth and Planetary Science" (PEPS) is an Open Access e-journal published by the Japan Geoscience Union (JpGU) and around 50 JpGU participating academic societies on the SpringerOpen platform. It was launched on April 22nd, 2014.
• PEPS aims to be one of the leading international geoscience journals.
• In addition to general research articles, the journal publishes research articles, review articles, articles with full data attached and articles focusing on new methodology.
• The Journal Steering and Planning Committee and the Journal Editorial Committee run the journal in cooperation with the JpGU Board of Directors, the JpGU member societies and Springer, the publisher. Approximately half of the members of the Editorial Committee are based in Japan, and half overseas.
• Authors may find templates and detailed instructions for submitting papers at "How to submit a paper, APC and Templates".
• Authors who publish their articles in PEPS are required to pay Article Processing Charges (APC).

The JpGU's Japanese name is, when literally translated into English, "The Japan Earth and Planetary Science Union". So we have taken the central part of this name, and, as we all hope for progress in our various fields, named the new journal "Progress in Earth and Planetary Science". "Science" was left in the singular to emphasize the overall unity of the field.

PEPS publishes articles in the following four categories: (1) Research articles; (2) Review articles that present current geoscientific knowledge in an organized from; (3) Papers with full data attached, which are scientific articles that preserve the full detailed raw research data and metadata which were gathered in their preparation and make these data freely available to the research community for further analysis; and (4) Methodology articles focusing on new research techniques and methodologies.

PEPS Covers all fields of earth and planetary sciences and interdisciplinary topics: (1) Space and planetary sciences; (2) Atmospheric and hydrospheric sciences; (3) Human geosciences; (4) Solid earth sciences; (5) Biogeosciences; and (6) Interdisciplinary research.

The Article Processing Charge (APC) for JpGU members and review papers is discounted by 20%. The APC for invited papers is fully covered by JpGU.

Journals tend to provide more recent information than is available in books, and given the rapid progress in many scientific fields, the relative importance attached by academic libraries to journals has been increasing. Major international scientific publishing houses think that this trend will continue for the foreseeable future. In view of this, the JpGU thinks that the emphasis placed by PEPS on review articles will provide scientists with the opportunity to read organized views of new developments more quickly than by waiting for them to appear in book form. We see the review article, which provides a summary of the latest systematic developments, as being mid-way between a scientific article and a book. We believe that the review articles in PEPS are useful educational resources for the geoscience community, for instance by forming the basis for university seminars.

We are broadly interested in the following seven types of articles:

• Explanations of individual research areas that will be useful to non-specialists in order to stimulate and support interdisciplinary research.
• Articles which organize current geoscientific knowledge, concepts and theory and thereby help stimulate new research.
• Articles which present information that is difficult to obtain from reading individual scientific articles, such as the overall state of a particular field.
• Reviews of the latest systematic knowledge that is not yet available in book form.
• Articles which present the latest data obtained by new research projects, its current interpretation and expectations for future developments.
• Reviews of completed research projects that cover the state of knowledge before the work was done, advances made due to the research and expectations for future developments.
• Articles that can be used in university seminars to introduce students and junior researchers to the latest developments.

PEPS has published many frequently cited and highly regarded review articles since its launch in 2014.

PEPS submits all articles to the peer review process. In order to maintain a high level of quality, and in the interests of fairness, all articles are impartially reviewed.

As the phrase open access e-journal suggests, anyone with an internet connection can read all the articles published in PEPS. There are absolutely no restrictions on access: anyone, anywhere can read as many of the articles as they wish.

The archive of published articles is copied and stored in several major international data centers. Without such backup, there is the risk that, should the publisher cease business for whatever reason, the individual PDF files that makeup the journal will be scattered and lost. We have worked to make PEPS immune to this risk. Even if an author is uncontactable or has lost their copy of an article, that article will continue to be available.

Until recently the copyright of a published article usually resided with the publisher. However for papers published in PEPS, the copyright basically rests with the author. Full details about copyright and licensing are provided at Copyright and license agreement.

• SPEPS covers the same research areas as PEPS (Space and planetary sciences; Atmospheric and hydrospheric sciences; Human geosciences; Solid earth sciences; Biogeosciences; and Interdisciplinary research). SPEPS includes planned contributions however we also welcome submissions from outside the journal.
• As usual, SPEPS accepts review articles; research articles; data articles; and methodology articles. It does not accept letters.
• Papers will be published following the same peer review and publication process as papers submitted to the regular PEPS.
• The published papers will be posted on the SpringerOpen website and will also be included in the respective SPEPS pages on the SpringerOpen and PEPS websites. (https://progearthplanetsci.springeropen.com/articles/collections, https://progearthplanetsci.org/articles_on_speps/）
• In principle, SPEPS will include keynote-style review articles. We will waive the Article Processing Charge (APC) for one of these articles for each edition of SPEPS.

While special issues of other journals usually publish papers from pre-selected authors, SPEPS is an open special issue that also accepts uninvited submissions from general authors. For retirement or memorial issues, we can only accept submissions for projects with international implications.

The impact factor (IF) of a journal is a number that expresses the average number of citations received by each article published in that journal over the preceding two years: generally, the higher the IF, the more prestigious the journal. For example, the PEPS Impact Factor (IF2years) for 2025 is calculated by dividing the total number of citations in 2025 of papers published in 2023 and 2024 by the total number of papers published during those two years. Articles published early in the year tend to contribute more to IF (because they have more time to gather citations). There are other indexes such as IF5 years or CiteScore which take a longer term view and these indices tend to be more relevant for journals in the fields covered by PEPS.

PEPS is currently recognized as a highly ranked journal in the field of Earth and planetary sciences based upon these journal evaluating indexes.

The JpGU holds the title rights to PEPS. Should the contract with the publisher be terminated for any reason, the JpGU will be able to make a contract with a new publishing company to continue producing the journal under its current name.

Reflecting growing research budgets and ever larger numbers of research scientists, the number of scientific journals is rising and of course the number of published papers is increasing very rapidly. On the other hand, the amount of time that an individual researcher can devote to research is limited. Forty years of data from a survey which asked how many papers European and American researchers were reading annually show that the average number was 150 in 1977 and that it reached a ceiling of 260 at the start of this century and has not increased further. Because of this limit there is a demand for high quality papers, in particular for high level review articles that summarize the contents of several tens of original research papers. By publishing high quality Review articles, PEPS hopes to help educate the scientific community and so open up new scientific frontiers.