The interface between minerals and biological systems underpins the many guises of life on Earth and potentially other planets. Interfaces also serve important roles to many applied research areas and emerging technologies, from mining and critical metal processing through to bioremediation, and from agriculture through to medicine and health. The immense range of this topic means it can sometimes fall between the cracks in publishing and not clearly fit within neatly categorised journals. For this reason, the Mineralogical Society, in collaboration with Cambridge University Press, is launching a new journal to support those working specifically with and at dynamic interfaces, including mineralogists, of course, but also biologists, chemists, engineers, materials scientists… in fact, anyone who would benefit from this new, ambitious, open access journal.

Establishing Geo-Bio Interfaces

The Mineralogical Society has been a great champion for cross-disciplinary science. This journey started in 2020 after an online special topics Society meeting on “The mineral-microbe interface through time and space.” Presentation breadth and quality were outstanding. At the wrap-up session, there was a fruitful discussion around developing an open access journal for our community. After additional market research and consultation with over 50 external reviewers, there was clearly a very strong demand for such a journal, and we started developing one.

Some key feedback included that Open Access is important to authors and that the journal needs to facilitate equal access to this option at no personal cost to the author, either through funding or waivers. Cambridge’s suite of transformative agreements with over 2,120 institutions, country-based discount schemes and discretionary waivers will make sure this clear need can be met.

There was also a strong desire to see revenue from the journal be used to support Society events and be reinvested into the research community. Cambridge’s status as a not-for-profit publisher means that both organisations are supporting the journal in the same way.

A journal serving the community

We are delighted that the Mineralogical Society has thrown their full support behind this endeavour in partnership with Cambridge. Our new journal will sit beside the long-established Clay Minerals and Mineralogical Magazine, and will extend publishing support to the diverse community that the Society serves. This is especially noteworthy as the Society expands its support of mineralogy and geoscience in the widest sense, in time for its 150-year anniversary celebrations in 2026.

For the last few months, we have been building up an excellent Associate Editor board, planning collections (including our first in the area of microbial biomineralization), and working alongside Cambridge and the Mineralogical Society as they put the infrastructure in place to accept our online submissions. This is a new venture for us all, and we are incredibly excited to launch Geo-Bio Interfaces for the community.

We have been publicising the new journal at major meetings this year with Cambridge, including at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in April 2023, and representation at the international Goldschmidt Conference in Lyon, France, organized by the European Association of Geochemistry and the Geochemical Society.

We look forward to hearing more from prospective authors, reviewers, and editors, who can find out more about the journal on Cambridge Core and view our call for papers for the new collection: Microbial Biomineralization.