This page is used for timely (and temporary) information about Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta or otherwise of interest to its readers.

Beginning in 2002, abstracts for the Goldschmidt Conference will be published in a special supplemental issue of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. The hardcopy issue will be distributed to conference registrants, but it will also be part of the normal electronic version of Geochimica as well as the hardcopy distributed to both individual and institutional subscribers. This is expected to be a convenience for conference attendees, and publication as part of Geochimica will mean that the abstracts are more widely distributed, archived along with the regular journal, and citable as regular scientific literature.

Conference abstracts are not processed in the GCA editorial office, and authors of conference abstracts should not send them to the editorial office. Conference abstracts should instead be submitted according to instructions provided by individual conference organizations. Information about upcoming conferences can be obtained by linking through the GS website.

Color figures are expensive and authors who want to print color figures must bear the cost. But the price has been reduced and is now only $600 (or 600 euros) for the first page, $300 (300 euros) for subsequent pages.

Members of the sponsoring societies (Geochemical Society, Meteoritical Society) who subscribe to Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta for 2002 will receive paper copies as in the past. In 2002, however, individual member subscribers will also have free access to an electronic version posted at a special internet site, compliments of Elsevier. This site will contain all full-text items published year-to-date, plus complete volumes for several years back. Instructions for how to implement access, plus the individualized "reader key" needed to register for electronic access, were sent to subscribers at the beginning of the year.

Authors of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta manuscripts will be given free temporary (three months) electronic access, as described above, compliments of Elsevier, even if they are not member of either sponsoring society. Authors may thus download the files for their own papers, providing a permanently available source of reprints. Instructions for access are posted elsewhere on this website. The correspondence authors will be notified of this facility, and supplied the "reader key" needed to register for electronic access, in the letter from the editorial office which announces transmittal of their manuscripts to Elsevier for publication. The correspondence author may share the access with co-authors.

Authors may now view and correct their proofs electronically. The proofs will be posted on the internet and when they are ready the correspondence author will receive an e-mail message advising that the proofs are ready and providing instructions and passwords. Corrections may also be returned electronically. This capability will allow authors to access their proofs promptly even when away from their home institutions and also facilitate sharing of proofs among co-authors. Electronic proofing is not mandatory, however, and traditional paper proofs will be supplied on request.

For those who are curious we provide a summary of various statistics relating to manuscript processing (for the Washington University editorial office only). This includes a quarterly tabulation of total manuscripts submitted, breakdown by type, processing time, etc. These can be viewed (in PDF format) by clicking the link below. These listings will be updated from time to time (see update above), and will also probably be reorganized from time to time.

Some of the statistical listings are necessarily incomplete. For the 4th quarter of 1999, for example, the initial review process (the AE report) has been completed for all manuscripts submitted during that period, and it is meaningful to consider a rejection rate, mean time to the AE report, etc. It is not meaningful to consider the same statistics for the 4th quarter of last year, however, since some of the manuscripts submitted during that period are still either under review or in production.

One of the statistics of major interest to many authors is the time to the AE report. This is when authors "receive" their reviews and evaluation from the AE and from the Executive Editor. In practical terms, for most manuscripts this is when it is determined whether or not a manuscript will eventually be accepted for publication. Another interval of interest is the time to "decision", i.e. the formal editorial acceptance or rejection of a manuscript. Most manuscripts which are rejected are rejected at the time of the AE report; for those which are ultimately accepted, the two times differ primarily by the time taken by authors to prepare their revised versions. The "sub to pub" time is the interval from initial submission to the cover date on the journal issue in which it appears (the cover date now pretty well matches the calendar date at which a given issue actually appears); this includes all the processing time in the editorial office plus all the production time (preparation, proofing, printing, etc.).

Quarterly Statistics