ELEMENTS AND GEOSCIENCEWORLD: SIXTEEN YEARS ON AT THE MINERALOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA (MSA) CENTENNIAL

Two events of significant impact for MSA took place on 1-Nov-2003 in Seattle at GSA’s annual meeting. The MSA council voted (1) to join the GeoScienceWorld aggregate of journals to publish digitally the American Mineralogist (AM) and the Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry (RiMG); and (2) to support the publication of the first issue of Elements magazine.

GeoScienceWorld grew from discussions between Geoscience societies as to how to meet the threat to scholarly journals from commercial publishers. A working group on digital publishing was established by GSA, AAPG, and SEG in 2001. Alex Speer, MSA's Executive Director, advocated for the interests of smaller societies in digital publishing and, consequently, MSA was asked to join as a founding member. GeoScienceWorld now publishes some 47 journals from 29 societies with over 1000 institutional subscribers.

Rod Ewing, then MSA's Vice-President, proposed the idea of Elements to the MSA Council on 4-Nov-2001 in Boston. The sense of Council was that the idea should be pursued. Rod visited a number of the Council meetings of related scientific societies and secured the participation of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland, the Mineralogical Association of Canada, the Geochemical Society and the Clay Minerals Society. Rod recruited Pierrette Trembley as managing editor and, with her hard work, Elements took off. The number of participating societies has grown from the founding 5 to a total of 17 with more than 14,000 individual subscribers.

MSA members continue to benefit from Council’s actions. Authors of journal articles enjoy global internet distribution of AM and RiMG to readers on all continents via high-quality, fully searchable PDF documents. Elements unites members with scientists of other societies through general interest articles and society news briefs in the multi-disciplinary, multi-society magazine.