Earth Science Informatics

The Earth Science Informatics [ESIN] journal aims at rapid publication of high-quality, current, cutting-edge, and provocative scientific work in the area of Earth Science Informatics as it relates to Earth systems science and space science. This includes articles on the application of formal and computational methods, computational Earth science, spatial and temporal analyses, and all aspects of computer applications to the acquisition, storage, processing, interchange, and visualization of data and information about the materials, properties, processes, features, and phenomena that occur at all scales and locations in the Earth system’s five components (atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, biosphere, cryosphere) and in space (see "About this journal" for more detail). The quarterly journal publishes research, methodology, and software articles, as well as editorials, comments, and book and software reviews. Review articles of relevant findings, topics, and methodologies are also considered.

Research, Technology and Education Objectives

ESIN will help to develop and shape the new field of Earth Science Informatics. It is intended to provide a dissemination platform for research using systems-based approaches to solve multi-scale Earth science problems by encouraging the development of robust formal and computational models and information systems. Since Earth Science Informatics is a new field just now emerging there is little precedence how to formally educate traditional domain knowledge-oriented scientists and engineers to become informaticists, and also how to effectively integrate cyberinfrastructure into Earth science education. The Earth Science Informatics journal will act as a venue to share experiences and concepts for educational approaches to accomplish the training of the next generation of Earth science informaticists as well as bringing cyberinfrastructure into the scholarly and graduate-level education.

Rationale for the Journal

Earth Science Informatics is a rapidly developing, interdisciplinary field with the potential to have a significant impact on the advancement of Earth system science by deriving new knowledge about the Earth system through formal information-rich and semantic-based approaches. Analysis and understanding of complex Earth phenomena and processes necessitate the integration of field, experimental, theoretical, and computation research through informatics.

Information on Open Research Funding and Support may be found here: https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/institutional-agreements

If you are a corresponding author affiliated with a German university or research institution, you are entitled to publish open access in our journals with fees covered by the German DEAL agreement.

More than 900 German institutions are eligible to participate in the agreement between Springer Nature and Projekt DEAL, meaning that corresponding authors affiliated with these institutions are eligible to publish their articles open access without being invoiced by Springer Nature. The agreement includes more than 2,000 hybrid journals across the Springer Nature portfolio (from January 2020) and more than 500 fully OA journals (from August 2020).

This international, English-language journal publishes original, interdisciplinary articles on all aspects of Earth Science Informatics, including geoinformatics, computational Earth science, and all aspects of computer applications dealing with the Earth Systems Science (ESS) and planetary and space science. Informatics is the science of the application of formal and computational methods to the systematic analysis, management, interchange, and representation of spatial and temporal data, information, and knowledge. Earth Science Informatics helps accessing, integrating, and processing ESS data with open, extensible, and interoperable computational software allowing Earth and space scientists to acquire, visualize, analyze, and share information about the Earth and space. Earth Science Informatics, as a scientific discipline, and the Earth Science Informatics journal that represents it, focus on the following major aspects:

• Formal representation of the spatial and temporal relationships between entities in the Earth system and space (e.g., semantics, spatial and process ontologies, vocabularies)
• Techniques for spatial and temporal analyses and their applications
• Design, development, and application of software tools to search, store, access, query, share, visualize, analyze and interchange data and knowledge (database, knowledge base)
• Data standardization, interoperability, and federation solutions
• Emerging technologies such as the Semantic Web and their applications in Earth and space science
• Data life cycle: data provenance, stewardship, archiving, preservation, curation, versioning, security, confidentiality, ownership, authenticity, quality, and policy