This is my fifth year on the Géotechnique Advisory Panel. For the first 3 years, I served as a panel member, and during the past year I participated in its meetings as the future editor. This has been an exciting time for me, as I was fortunate to work with my predecessors, John Atkinson and Chris Clayton, and the panel who strived to transform the journal by implementing the electronic editorial management system and digging through the huge backlog of papers accumulated over the years. We owe all of them a great debt.
In order to reflect better the international status of Géotechnique, Chris Clayton and ICE Publishing worked together to increase international participation in the panel, and now almost one-third of its members come from outside the UK. In 2011, to everybody's and my own surprise, I was elected as the editor! I take this both as a great honour and a great responsibility.
Géotechnique has always been a very special and selective journal with a very thorough review process, which took a considerable amount of time to accomplish: for instance, the average submission-to-acceptance time for the papers published in 2011 was 18 months. Such a time frame for peer review does not fit anymore with the modern era of electronic publishing. It is not surprising that some of our authors have started to lose their patience.
There is a broad consensus within UK and international geotechnical communities that the Géotechnique editorial procedure needs a global reform. The major challenge is in maintaining high standards while reducing dramatically publication times. I have investigated possible strategies over the past year and had productive discussions with editors of Nature and Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, well known for their successful combination of the top quality and efficiency.
The reason this editorial did not appear in the first issue of 2012 is that such a reform cannot succeed without the strong support of the panel. All the more I am pleased that in our first meeting of 2012 the panel unanimously supported my proposal, which is briefly outlined below.
Pre-assessment
All submitted papers will be pre-assessed. They will be rejected before being sent for reviews if their length, scope and scientific or linguistic quality do not satisfy Géotechnique standards.
Timeline
The average time from submission to first decision should not exceed 2 months. Resubmissions will be processed within 1 month. Rejections without review will take no longer than 3 weeks.
Quality
Following Géotechnique tradition, a very thorough reviewing process will be carried out, based on the collective effort in appointing the most appropriate internal assessor and external reviewers and on the final discussion of the paper by the panel. Pre-assessment will allow us to devote our energy primarily to high-quality papers, with the goal of making a final decision after not more than two rounds of review.
Content
We shall invite state-of-the-art review papers from leading scientists and outstanding case histories from leading practitioners. We shall be looking for new creative ideas for the future symposia in print and themed issues.
Production
Time to final publication online (Ahead of Print, fully citable using the DOI system), and later in print, will decrease significantly. Immediately after acceptance, the title and abstract of a paper will go online. The table of contents of the latest electronic issue will be sent to the e-mail addresses of all our former and present authors and reviewers, and interested members of the international community (who, of course, may opt out at any time).
Reviewers
We rely on the support of our great reviewers in achieving these challenging goals to the benefit of all of us. I hope that in spite of being extremely busy, you will make your best effort to provide your first review within 4 weeks and your response to a resubmission within 2 weeks. On our part, we promise to make your life easier by simplifying the review form, by rejecting low-quality papers without sending them to you and by reducing the number of review rounds for high-quality papers. Efficient referees will be rewarded: for every two reviews submitted on time, you will receive a voucher which you can use towards payment for the latest titles from the ICE bookshop (http://www.icebookshop.com/).
Authors
I would like to ask our authors to send us the best of your papers, as has been a long-standing tradition since the establishment of our journal. The implementation of the reforms outlined above will, of course, take some time, but I can assure you that we shall not disappoint you. I will personally continuously scan the system to identify ‘problem cases' and bring them to the attention of those responsible. I would like to encourage you to contact me directly at the e-mail address below if you have any concerns. But we also ask for your help: please, do not delay working on revisions – we need your response within 8 weeks of our first decision.
Finally, as overwhelming as these changes may sound, in reality their implementation does not require any additional work from anyone: it is just a cultural change of priorities, which other scientific communities' journals have long adopted. Sixty-four years ago, Géotechnique became the leading force for the international geotechnical community. We can help the journal to secure this position also in our new electronic era.
