GSW for Societies

Strategic solutions and shared services for scholarly societies

The GSW Advantage

Founded by pre-eminent global geoscience societies, GSW is an independent nonprofit organization created to bring together peer-reviewed society research in one place. Through our cooperative and inclusive approach to content sharing, GSW is able to share opportunities and expertise across geoscientific societies of all sizes.

What We Offer

GSW’s shared infrastructure and strong operations focus help participating societies take advantage of technology and shared services at reduced costs and with increased efficiency. Hosting and disseminating content on GSW’s platform drives usage and discovery by delivering traffic to a sizable, globally recognized, and domain-focused “version of record” site.

  • Hosting
  • Collaborative roadmap development
  • Project management
  • Sales and marketing
  • Fulfillment
  • Renewals
  • Customer service

Society Services Customers

GSW provides a full spectrum of services—from publishing to sales to member relations—to these leading geoscience societies:

Benefits of GSW

GSW’s Society Services offer scholarly societies in the Earth Sciences the opportunity to join a collective of likeminded organizations to share technology, resources, costs, and learnings. Societies sign up for our services because it offers them:

GSW offers a single content conversion and one platform that brings together all a society’s journals and books and integrates them with fellow GSW societies and GeoRef. This not only eliminates duplication of costs for different platforms but provides a seamless reader experience. We also provide usage reporting for each subscribing institution as well as membership at large.

The GSW Research Platform averages 11.5 million annual pageviews, serving more than 61,000 society members. 97% of platform subscribers renew every year.

Usage on the GSW research platform is a combination of society institution, member, and GSW subscriber usage, meaning that each participating society sees increased royalties. By returning a high proportion of our income to our content partners, we help protect the viability and independence of society publishing programs while constantly exploring and incorporating valuable economic, technological, and strategic benefits of collaboration.

Since our inception, we’ve returned over $59.6 million to societies to advance their publishing, research, and educational programs.

By adopting the GSW research platform, GSW takes over the costs associated with hosting technology, ongoing platform enhancements, technological requirements, and innovation. This frees up society budgets for other member-focused programs and initiatives.

GSW engages with societies to define all requirements around platform enhancements, reducing staff resourcing costs product development and manage. We also help manage societies’ sales pipeline, from selling subscriptions and access to sales fulfilment, renewal negotiations, and customer service.

Every scholarly society is feeling the pressure to go open access, but not every publisher has the means to flip a journal or launch a new title. GSW re-launched Lithosphere as a community-oriented open access journal that invites transfers from GSW member publishers. Lithosphere is now the #1 open access geology journal by impact factor, and transferring to Lithosphere can make your society compliant with Plan S and your membership’s OA expectations.

GSW meets regularly with executive directors to understand strategic priorities and opportunities for collaboration amongst participating societies. Through these interactions, GSW creates common ground for cross-society discussions and networking so that all participating societies can benefit from new ideas and development.

Interested in Joining GSW?

Interested in joining our Society Services program? Our society partnerships team is waiting to hear from you. Fill out the form below, and we’ll set up a time to talk about GSW’s options for scholarly societies.

Angie Anderson

Don’t want to fill out a form? Book a time to talk to GSW Director of Society Services Angie Anderson about your society’s needs.

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