When you submit an article (termed your ‘preprint’) to a Geological Society publication, it will go through a peer-review process. You will probably have to revise it to take account of the reviewers’ comments before it is (hopefully) accepted (at which point, it’s called your ‘postprint’). Journal articles and book articles or chapters do progress slightly differently but, generally speaking, on acceptance your article will come through to production, it will be published online as an Accepted Manuscript and we will begin the copyediting and typesetting process. Once typeset, your article is in the form of a PDF proof. This goes through a round of correction and, when you and the Editor(s) are happy that all is well, it is published online (replacing the Accepted Manuscript and becoming the Version of Record) in advance of the rest of the book or the complete issue of the journal. This means that your work is published and disseminated as soon as possible via the Online First feature of our Lyell Collection. Note that if your article is part of a Memoir or one of the Engineering Geology Special Publications, it will not be part of this advanced online publication workflow.

When all the other articles in the book are also at this stage, or when the composition of the journal issue has been decided and the articles are ready, your contribution will publish within the complete book or journal issue as a hard copy publication. At the same time, your Online First article will transition to the complete-book or journal issue area of the website. Your article has been published!

Once your article has published online as the Version of Record, the corresponding author will receive an email providing a link to allow you to download the final PDF of the article and share it or its link with all your co-authors. If, during the production stages, you have paid for your article to be Gold Open Access (OA), you can share and post your article to any websites without permission. If you have not opted for Gold OA, you can save the PDF to your hard drive or other personal electronic media and you can email your PDF to colleagues and third parties for research purposes. You CANNOT post the final PDF or any of the previous typeset proof versions that we have sent you to any website or repository.

If you want to post your work to publicly accessible websites to share with colleagues, but your article is not Gold OA, you can post only the preprint (or Author’s Original) – the version prior to peer review. This must not be for commercial purposes. Twelve months after publication of your article, you may post a postprint (or Accepted Manuscript) to your personal web page or your institutional website or repository. You must include a link to the abstract of the published article in the Lyell Collection. Again, you CANNOT post the final PDF or any previous typeset proof version that we have sent you to any website or repository unless you have paid for the article to be Gold OA.

For further information, please see our website (GSL terms of use).

Best wishes 

The Production Team