Why geoRxiv

We made geoRxiv hoping that it will help researchers exchange their ideas even better and clearer.

There are probably too many journals out there. In my institution we have three that I know of: faculty of engineering jounral, GIS journal (from Geographic Department, and the Universtiy one). To be honest, it was just a few days since I know the existence of the Faculty of Engineering Journal. I had a publication on it once, though I thought it was a magazine not a journal. Also, they are too outdated, and they don't come through any reviews There was an incident on 2016 when University of Khartoum decided to show all of the theses online. In less than two weeks, they have recieved more than 70 copy rights infrigment. Dr. Ahmed Abdalla told me about this incident.. Sometimes, a reboot is necessary.

Design decisions in geoRxiv

We have faced a few design decisions along the way. The most notable is, whether to stick with the PDF based journals, or use HTML. A few years ago, such a discussion was not even possible. But not things have changed, a lot. Javascript allowed people to do all kind of crazy thing with the browser dom. Some decided to run a Windows 2000 on it, others, well, they decided to make it to make it their new journal platform. We were inspired by these blog posts to use HTML instead of PDF as our publication platform.

Manuscripts should be submitted with an accompany notebooks. Data processing is a very important part in science. Abstracting this part, and making readers unaware of what happened behind the scence is harmful. We are blocking an important part of the picture by that. We also believe that, hiding dataset is harmfull, too. We cannot reproduce your work and build upon while you are hiding its source. In georXiv, it is mandatory to submit your manuscript with accompany notebook, where you show every step in your work: how did you get the data, how you parsed it, how you produce these figures, etc. We believe that will contribute a lot in making our publications easier to reproduce and understand, and also easily to extend and correct. There is a current strong movement in research reproducibility. We ought to follow them. We would like to encourage reproducibility and open access. Perhaps one of the popular notebooks is LIGO's one. LIGO team has published a notebook for their Gravitational Wave Discovery You can find the materials here..

Tutorial on Distill Template

As we have mentioned earlier, we are using Distill template for our journal. Distill came with a nice configurations and styling that makes your manuscript appealing without much of effort. We are aware that, not all of the field researcher are familiar with these tools. We are willing to help them on that. I have already written a detailed tutorial on how to use our template. You can find it here. If you have any further questions, you can also contact me.

How Submission Works

One of the main reasons behind geoRxiv, is to make submission cycle a lot easier. First, the template came with preconfigurations suits most of the uses. In most cases, you do not even need to do any tweaks, it is meant to work out of the box. If you ignored these funny html tags, everything looks like a raw text.

There are three phases in our submission cycle

• The first phase: we do a fast check here to see whether your topic suits our journal. We also do quick check on your html source.
• Peer review. We are working on making (double) blind peer review. We believe it best suits our goals of having unbaised review . After that we will publish your work. Notice that, we expect lots of submissions and few editors. This stage may take three months, and hopefully not more.
• We will continue review your work and suggest modifications. Unlike classic publications, our journal will allow more people to access and hence suggest modifications on your work.

There are two modes in Distill: draft mode, and publish mode. In draft mode, by default we hide authors names and their affilations from the editors. That helps authors very much as they do not need to write two version, one of them is just for double blind review. Once the manuscript is accepted, author names and their affilations automatically shows up.

Project Structure

In this section, we will to highlight the main project structure, how are we going to handle the work, and other financial stuffs.

I'm very active in open source projects. NumPy , perhaps the single most important package in Python Language, has received its first financial grant in 2017. After more than ten years since their first version 1 release. That is really bad. Had its core developers was not so committed to it, it would definetly failed. If we need this journal to survive, we need to financially support it. Unfortunatelly, in my country, there is not NFS, or similar organizations to seek grants. I'm trying to seek donations using other medium e.g, kickstarter and gofundme. But they are not enough. I believe, believe reviwers should be paid for their work. I mean, a lot of money is spent on useless things anyway You can refer to the ones that spent on useless stuffs on many conferences and summits. If we could allocate just a little bit from it, we can pay to our reviewers. It won't be that much, but it subconciously trigger his brain to feel that he was rewarded. His work is recognized, which will make him work even better..

Currently we have one maintainer for the template source code and the website, too. We also have three reviewers and three technical reviewers. We will continue our work to include other editors and establish the editors committe. In the mean time, we only have one postdoctoral researcher and two master's holders. The numbers are not what would wish for, they are the only ones available now. Our editors only cover small portion of geosciences fields. We hope for more fields. We do not have any female members in the journal team. That is bad. We will try to fix it as soon as possible.

List of our team members.

• Ahmed Abdalla, Postdoctoral researchers, University of Libienz.
• Ahmed Mutasim, Masters, University of Nottingham.
• Ayman Adil, Masters, University of Nottingham.


• Mohamed Yousif.
• Mohamed Jaafar.
• Ahmed Mahmood.

Project Top Secret Goals

I have worked at University of Khartoum for a year. I taught classes for senior students. I can say that there is a big problem in our current teaching models. Even students at their final year cannot properly use their email (well, properly is a strong word. They actually cannot use it at all.) Let alone writing a scientific publication. If no one tries to solve this thing, we will definetly doomed. I mean, what are you expecting from a master's students that never read/write any article! Things are getting worse by time.

Change in old institutions is difficult. You just need to convince lots of people who do not even care. They just shut you down. They are like white blood cells except they are bad. In my opinion, it is best to forfeit such cases. That is why I choose to make this journal instead of trying to fix existed ones. So, our very secret top goals is to use this journal to help students write better (and, also for God's sake, help our old professors write something.)It might not be that secret, though try to read it whispering. It sounds a lot like a top secret thing.

A wise man once said, Our problem is that we do not read, and when we read we do not understand, when we understand, we execute poorly. We would like to encourage people to read, and you know make that as easy task as possible.

Along the way, people tend to loose orientation. Scientific publication is meant to share knowledge and make it accessible There is a nice post by Donald K. Knuth about this topic. He said, he spent much of his time reading to understand things, so that he can help people who cannot spend that much of time.. Now, human knowledge are locked behind publications corporations. Students need to pay to be able to read a paper. And that is not the worst part, authors do not even get to make any revenue from their works. It is not a win-win at all. We need to stand against that.

Feel free to contact me for any further questions on inqueries. I look forward to hearing from you soon.