If your paper is accepted you (or your employer) will be required to grant the Society an exclusive licence to publish and accept the terms and conditions for use of your final PDF.
The journal aims to publish a balanced mix of articles from those geoscience disciplines involved in the exploration, appraisal and development of hydrocarbon resources. Articles concerning exploration geology and geophysics, geochemistry and petrophysics, reservoir geology and reservoir engineering are welcomed.
Submission
All submissions to
Petroleum Geoscience should be made online via
http://www.editorialmanager.com/petgeo/. Full instructions and a tutorial can be found within that site.
Before submitting a manuscript, it is recommended that you have the following to hand:
- all authors' first, middle names/initials and last names
- all authors' email addresses
- the role of each contributor in preparing the paper (see: http://dictionary.casrai.org/Contributor_Roles)
- manuscript files in Word or RTF formats
- tables in XLS, CSV or DOC formats
- figures/images in TIF, EPS, PDF or JPG formats (see note on file size)
- supplementary data files
- covering letter (which the referees will see)
- abstracts of any related papers that you have in press
It is a good idea to put all your files in one folder.
Note that there is a file-size limit of 10 MB to keep the merged PDFs manageable for editing and review. If your files are bigger, please make smaller versions for review and we will request the high-resolution files off-system when your paper is accepted.
The submission package will guide you through the processes for submitting your files and confirmation/approval.
Authors are encouraged to restrict their papers to a maximum of 12 journal pages, including figures, tables and references.
Papers should be arranged as follows:
- Title: brief and specific; followed by name(s) and address(es) of authors(including email address of corresponding author)
- Abstract: this must be intelligible without reference to the paper, and should not exceed 200 words. Figures are not allowed in the Abstract
- Main body of paper: subdivided into 1st, 2nd and 3rd order headings; omit heading 'Introduction'
- Acknowledgements (and funding)
- Please include line numbers on left hand side to help the reviewers
- Appendices: see Supplementary Data
- References: in full; authors' names must be keyed as capitals and lower case
- Tables
- Figure captions
- Figures (10 MB maximum) in separate files
Page format
In the final typeset version the main text is in double column format. Final printed page size: 296 mm deep by 210 mm wide. Maximum final size of illustrations: 240 mm deep by 178 mm wide. Single column width: 85 mm. Number of words per page: 900.
Titles, authors and affiliations: for a short title and one author, allow 100 words; for a longer title and/or several authors and affiliations, allow up to 300 words.
Abstract: straightforward word count
Text: straightforward word count (1000 words = 1 page)
References: allow 40 references per page
Figures: single column – estimate ¼ or ½ page depending on depth of figure; for double and 1½ column figures – estimate ½ or 1 page depending on depth of figure. Landscape figures = whole page
Figure captions: straightforward word count unless it is a 1½ column figure, in which case don't include caption in count.
Tables: across one column (max total 65 characters width including three character space between each column) – estimate ¼ or ½ page depending on length of table; across two columns – estimate ½ or 1 page depending on the length of the table. Landscape tables = whole page.
Colour charges
Colour printing incurs extra costs, and like most publishers, we pass these costs to authors in order to keep the subscription price as low as possible. Society subscription prices are much lower than those of many commercial publishers.
For Petroleum Geoscience the cost to authors is £500 for the first page within a paper, then £50 for subsequent pages provided the paper is no more than 8 pages in length.
You can have colour in the online version at no cost provided that we can use the same file as for printing in black and white (i.e. we can just switch the colour off in the print version).
Open Access publishing
Authors may choose to make their article fully Open Access (sometimes called ‘Gold Open Access’) on payment of an Article Processing Charge. For Journal of the Geological Society the APC is £1600/$3200. Articles where the first author or at least half the authors are Fellows of the Geological Society are entitled to a £250 discount. There is a 50% discount for articles where all the authors are at a research institution in a developing country.
More information on the Society’s policy can be found at
www.geolsoc.org.uk/open-access.
You can select Open Access when you submit your article online. You do not need to pay until after your article is accepted. There will be a link to the payment authorization form in the acceptance letter.
If you require Open Access but cannot pay the APC, the Geological Society also supports ‘Green Open Access’, where you can post your final post-refereed version of the article to a website or repository 12 months after the online publication date.
Authors must not post a typeset proof or final version to any website or repository unless the article is fully Open Access.
Refereeing and editing
A member of the editorial board will send your paper to at least two referees. They will handle the papers through the reviewing and scientific editing procedure and approve the finalized script for publication. We expect the reviewing and editing procedure to take about three to five months in the case of a paper requiring little revision. We are of course dependent on the goodwill of unpaid reviewers to achieve these targets.
You can keep track of this process through the online submissions package.
Production
The Production Editor will write to the corresponding author notifying them of when the paper is due to be published. The paper will be copyedited and then sent to an external typesetter. Proofs will be sent to you by email. We do not generally send revised proofs to the author. The production process takes 6–8 weeks from acceptance to online publication.
Offprints
You will be emailed instructions on how to download a PDF of your paper from the online version of the journal. Paper offprints can be ordered; instructions will be sent with the proof email.
Norman Falcon Award
The EAGE’s Norman Falcon Award is presented to the author(s) of the best paper published in Petroleum Geoscience (or in First Break in a related topic) in the calendar year preceding the award. The paper should be of high scientific standard and should represent a significant contribution to one or more sub-surface disciplines.
Keeping in touch
GSL produces a regular author email newsletter (about 6 times each year). If you would like to receive this, please contact our marketing department (
marketing@geolsoc.org.uk). You do not have to be a published author to sign up. You can unsubscribe at any time.