GeoScienceWorld (GSW), a pioneer in collaborative scholarly publishing within the geoscience community, is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Established in 2004 by leading global geoscience societies, GSW has continually evolved to better serve the discipline and community through collaboration. Today, GSW provides researchers around the world with a single source of access to preeminent scholarly journals and eBooks with specialized and map-based search and discovery capabilities and links to a broad scope of curated earth science research. As a unique and trusted non-profit, GSW returns 93% of net revenue to membership societies to achieve their scientific missions, and since inception has distributed over $60 million back to its publishing partners.
GSW’s founding mission was to provide a non-profit aggregate for peer-reviewed society research online. GSW’s structure, inspired by the BioOne model, involved funding and governance from founding societies. The goal was to create a cooperative advantage, uplifting smaller organizations with the support of their larger counterparts. GSW emerged as an aggregator, offering a single platform for access to thousands of articles, easing the burden on libraries and researchers. What began as a world-class digital platform for journals has expanded to include eBooks, diverse content types, society services such as membership, technology, and administrative support, and Open Access publishing.
GSW’s founding societies included the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), American Geosciences Institute (AGI), Geological Society of America (GSA), Geological Society of London (GSL), Mineralogical Society of America (MSA), SEPM Society for Sedimentary Geology, and the Society of Exploration Geophysics (SEG). Faced with the challenge of providing secure and accessible digital journal content, together they envisioned shared technologies, economies of scale, and global dissemination to extend benefits that might otherwise be limited to commercial deals, potentially jeopardizing societies’ long-term independence as publishers.
As GSW enters its third decade, the organization remains dedicated to fostering collaboration, supporting scholarly societies, and advancing geoscience knowledge worldwide.
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