STM publisher Springer has announced that it is starting an open access publication of the journal Earth, Planets and Space (EPS) on behalf of five academic societies in Japan. EPS is the official journal of The Society of Geomagnetism and Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences; The Seismological Society of Japan; The Volcanological Society of Japan; The Geodetic Society of Japan; and The Japanese Society for Planetary Sciences. The journal is a long-running journal, formerly published by Terrapub under a traditional subscription model.
Earth, Planets and Space covers scientific articles in earth and planetary sciences, and in particular geomagnetism, aeronomy, space science, seismology, volcanology, geodesy and planetology. The journal also publishes articles in new and interdisciplinary subjects, including instrumentations. In 2012 EPS had an impact factor of 2.921.
The journal includes new and original articles with no page limit, letters limited to eight pages, frontier letters and technical reports. Frontier letters are articles which are invited by the editor-in-chief, while technical reports are presentations of software tools, experimental or computational methods, or hardware designs.
The back issues are being transferred to SpringerOpen as open access articles under the Creative Commons Attribution license. Prof. Yasuo Ogawa from the Tokyo Institute of Technology serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal.
