UIS Commission on Karst Hydrogeology and Speleogenesis

I am happy to inform the karst/cave scholar community that the online journal “Speleogenesis and Evolution of Karst Aquifers" (SEKA) is back on track after being in the dormant mode during last four years. This interruption has been caused by some technical and organisational difficulties, which are now overcome.

The SEKA journal is rejuvenated on a completely new, modern and efficient, technological platform that allows easy and quick management and publishing. The new journal site is launched today, containing the next issue (10, 2011):

www.journal.speleogenesis.info

The SEKA journal uses "an open issue" model in the publishing process, with a current issue open for additions during half a year, and new articles appearing as soon as they passed selection/reviewing/ editing procedures. After closure of a current issue, it goes to the archive (Volumes and Issues) and permanently remains there as a single journal issue retaining a structure formed during publication.

With the launch of the "new series" of the journal, the publication policy is slightly modified (see the "Publication Policy" section of the site).

Besides publishing original articles, SEKA will re-publish selected papers from the sister karst and cave journals of a broader scope, and also from conference proceedings and other "grey literature", which present important advances in studying speleogenesis and karst hydrogeology (provided permission is granted by the original publishers). In this way, works that are particularly important to the field of speleogenesis and karst hydrogeology will get additional visibility and will be included into the special Speleogenesis collection.

Another focus of the journal will be referencing current publications pertinent to the field of speleogenesis and karst hydrogeology from both, existing karst/cave journals and other geoscience journals. The SEKA highlights them as Featured Articles and provides links to respective full-text files on the original publisher web site.

The papers to be originally published, re-published and highlighted in SEKA are selected by the leading experts in the field serving on the journal Editorial Board and the Bureau of the UIS Commission of Karst Hydrogeology and Speleogenesis. Publications in SEKA and those in other journals that are referenced and highlighted in SEKA will constitute the Speleogenesis Collection, the recommended professional reading for scholars in the field. We hope to develop a premier one-stop scholarly source for the field of karst hydrogeology and speleogenesis.

The journal is integrated with two specialized fully searchable bibliographic systems:
1) World Cave & Karst Science Journals – a complete bibliography of the 15 major journals (currently contains about 5,000 entries);
2) KarstBase – a "comprehensive" current karst/cave science bibliography (currently contains about 10,000 entries). All items appearing in SEKA (original, re-published and featured articles) automatically enter these systems, which also function separately from the journal. New pages of these bibliography systems will be soon incorporated to the journal website.

Members of karst/cave scholar community are kindly invited to submit original papers and recommend papers for re-publishing and highlighting in the renovated Speleogenesis and Evolution of Karst Aquifers.

Sincerely yours,

Alexander Klimchouk