Welcome to Geotechnical Research, ICE’s gold open-access journal for geotechnical engineering. It is our great pleasure to write the editorial for the fourth issue and also the final issue of the first volume. Geotechnical Research is designed to disseminate knowledge on any aspect of modern geotechnical engineering through the gold open-access model in which article publication charges (APC) paid by authors support the open (free) access by readers. The rigorous blind peer-review process is carried out by an international editorial board, while every effort is made to ensure short processing times. A few obvious advantages of open-access journals include the free access to scientific articles regardless of affiliation with a subscribing library, lower costs for research in academia and industry, in addition to improved access for the general public and higher citation rates for the authors (Eysenbach, 2006). However, the main argument against open-access journals is the possible damage to the peer-review system, diminishing the overall quality of scientific journal publishing. This problem can be solved by a strict and unbiased peer-review system.
Geotechnical Research is the first open-access geotechnical engineering journal of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE). This online journal is run by Dr Dariusz Wanatowski as editor-in-chief together with another 38 international editorial board members from 17 countries. It has been our aim to have approximately three articles per issue published in Geotechnical Research for its first volume. The articles cover a wide range of topics from theoretical soil mechanics to geotechnical applications.
This fourth issue of Geotechnical Research includes two original articles. The first article, by Lade and Trads (2014), reviews the deformation and strength characteristics of uncemented and cemented sands in a single perspective. The influence of undisturbed natural structure on soils’ mechanical characteristics has been noted since the early days of soil mechanics, as implied in the classic textbook by Terzaghi and Peck (1948). It was in the 1990s and 2000s, however, that the influence of cementation, whether occurring naturally or artificially, attracted researchers’ attention. The background to this is the possibility of establishing a generally accepted conceptual basis of uncemented soil mechanics, as represented by the critical state theory, upon which advanced features may be given room for incorporation. The authors offer a comprehensive interpretative and descriptive framework for both cemented and uncemented states without invoking a cumbersome array of equations.
The second article, by Likitlersuang et al. (2014), discusses a practical approach to predicting the ground deformation involved in shield tunnelling, noting the reality that the three-dimensional (3D) nature of the problem cannot be readily captured in numerical analysis in practice, as two-dimensional (2D) modelling is still the norm in many commercial software packages. The authors picked up case studies of the Bangkok Mass Rapid Transit project and explored how three different methods of representing the tunnelling sequences in a 2D simulation compared to each other. The article, while acknowledging the complexity of the tunnelling problem in the 3D reality, sheds a new light on the usefulness of conventional 2D simulation, if adopted with appropriate techniques.
Several well-established geotechnical journals have started partially to adopt the open-access model, in which the article publication charge is fully paid by authors. It is optional for authors to promote their work widely by choosing this method. Some journals promote having fully open-access a few years after articles are first published. This cost is subsidised by the societies, organisations or publishers that those journals belong to. However, there are only a few geotechnical engineering gold open-access journals. An impression is, to put it frankly, that most authors still seem to believe that the standard of open-access journals is comparatively low – they may be afraid of contributing their good works to open-access journals. To standardise the journal’s quality, Geotechnical Research aims in the coming future to be indexed in international journal databases such as SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) or Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Report (JCR).
On behalf of the editorial board and ICE Publishing, we would like to invite academic researchers and practising civil engineers worldwide to consider ICE’s Geotechnical Research as a platform for disseminating their geotechnical research work. We look forward to receiving your contribution and hope that you will find this journal interesting and useful for your own careers in both academia and engineering practice.
