- » Aim and Scope
- » Section Policies
- » Publication Frequency
- » Open Access Policy
- » Archiving
- » Peer Review Process
- » Publishing Ethics
- » Founder
- » Author Fees
- » Disclosure and Conflict of Interest
- » Plagiarism Detection
- » Preprint and Postprint Policy
- » Revenue Sources
Aim and Scope
The journal aims to amalgamate interests of geologists from different establishments and majors, including academic scholars and practicing geologists. The journal’s scientific scope means collaboration with geologists from foreign countries that primarily have extensive national borders with Russia, which cross single geological structures.
For over 30 years, the journal has been spotlighting the national geological life; it publishes new data on geology, mineral deposits patterns, prospects and distribution, tectonics, structural geology, geodynamics, and geophysics.
Section Policies
Open SubmissionsPublication Frequency
4 issues per year
The publication schedule for the journal Regional Geology and Metallogeny in 2025:
Vol. 32, no. 1 (101) — 31.03.2025 (manuscript submission until 14.02.2025)
Vol. 32, no. 2 (102) — 27.06.2025 (manuscript submission until 05.05.2025)
Vol. 32, no. 3 (103) — 30.09.2025 (manuscript submission until 31.07.2025)
Vol. 32, no. 4 (104) — 26.12.2025 (manuscript submission until 31.10.2025)
Open Access Policy
This is an open-access journal; all articles are made freely available to readers immediatly upon publication.
Our open access policy is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI); it means that articles are freely available on the internet, which permits any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as software data, or use them for any other lawful purposes, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.
For more information please read the BOAI statement.
Archiving
- Russian State Library (RSL)
- National Electronic Information Consortium (NEICON)
Peer Review Process
All the manuscripts submitted to the editorial office of the journal Regional Geology and Metallogeny (thereinafter — journal) undergo a peer review process in order to provide an objective expert assessment. The peer review period is up to two months after the manuscript being registered in the editorial office. Exceptionally, the journal’s Editorial Board can prolong the peer review period.
The journal provides a single-blind peer review, which means the reviewer knows the authors, but the authors do not know the reviewer. The editorial office is responsible for connecting the authors and reviewers.
The editorial office retains peer review reports for five years. Upon request, the editorial office sends copies of peer review reports to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation.
The expert assessment involves the following stages: formal assessment of the manuscript content, its peer review, and final assessment.
Formal assessment of the manuscript content
It involves examining the manuscript for complying with the journal sections and requirements for its structure and layout (refer to Appendix 2 of the document Guide for Authors dated 17.02.2025). Antiplagiat, the licensed software system for detecting textual borrowings in research papers, checks the manuscript content for originality. When the originality is minimum 90 percent, the manuscript can proceed to the next stage for assessment.
If the software system Antiplagiat detects the text that generative artificial intelligence has created, the editorial office reserves the right to examine the volume of the generated text from the manuscript and its rewriting quality. The selected reviewer provides a final decision whether to include such a text in the manuscript.
Peer review
Professionals respected for their expertise in the manuscript subject area are involved in its peer review. The Editor-in-Chief, its deputies, and field-specific members of the Editorial Council as agreed by the Editor-in-Chief can announce the reviewers. They can be internal reviewers — Karpinsky Institute’s employees and external ones — from other organizations in Saint Petersburg and beyond; employees of regional branches, regional science centers and offices of the Russian Academy of Sciences are of top priority. The journal’s Deputy Editors-in-Chief and members of the Editorial Council can become reviewers. Questionable judgments on publishing research papers (positive and negative feedback on one manuscript) encourage the editorial office to seek meta peer review. Meta peer reviewers are the journal’s Deputy Editors-in-Chief and members of the Editorial Council.
When sending the peer review report to the editorial office, the reviewer consents to have the provided peer review report published or disseminated via research databases closed access. Reviewers sign a cooperative agreement if their peer review report is published open access (Appendix 1).
Manuscript assessment criteria are as follows:
- research rationale (correspondence of the manuscript content to modern achievements in the addressed field of study);
- novelty and scientific merit of the obtained findings (new contribution to the field of study; exploring new subjects, problems, phenomena; determination of previously unknown properties, patterns, connections);
- data description (correspondence of the manuscript title to the content, logics and consistency, volume and structure, research methods, statistical data processing);
- data presentation (scientific style, terminology; informative value of figures and tables; quality of figures, diagrams, and charts);
- science sources citation (quality and completeness of the References list, relevance of references to the sources, modern and foreign sources);
- informative value of the abstract (including the research topic, aim, methods, findings, and inferences; novelty, scientific merit, and practical significance) and keywords (matching the research topic and covering the subject and terminology area);
- assets of the research paper;
- limitations of the research paper (critical remarks).
The reviewer finally advises on the manuscript publication:
- It is recommended to publish the manuscript as a research article without changes.
- It is recommended to publish the manuscript as a research article after making the reviewer’s major revisions.
- Inviting an expert for additionally reviewing the manuscript is required.
- It is recommended to publish the manuscript as a research article after making the reviewer’s minor revisions.
- The manuscript cannot be published in the journal, since it does not match its subject area and requirements, is irrelevant.
When signing the peer review report (Appendix 2), the reviewer acknowledges no time limit storage and processing of their personal data listed in table 2. The published articles are uploaded on the Scientific electronic library website eLIBRARY.RU, with closed-access peer review report texts included. There are also the reviewer’s closed-access data.
The authors have the right to read copies of the peer review reports and respond to the reviewers’ comments.
The journal’s editorial office decides on the manuscript to be published, with the peer review reports considered and upon consent of the Deputy Editors-in-Chief or Editorial Council members who have announced the reviewers. The unofficial positive feedback enables the editorial office to include the manuscript, which is accepted for publication, in the annual publishing plan. The research articles are published in order of submission priority, after filling the journal sections or its thematic issues.
Upon providing the reviewer’s minor revisions, the authors receive their manuscript accompanied with the peer review report and the editorial office’s comments. The authors submit their updated manuscript (edited as per the reviewer’s comments) and peer review report response (Appendix 3) (including the editing description) within two weeks after receiving the peer review report and editorial office’s comments. The reviewer’s major revisions can be made for one month maximum. The Editor-in-Chief, Deputy Editors-in-Chief, or a field-specific member of the Editorial Council receive the revised materials for approval (additional reviewing or editing).
The journal’s editorial office has the right to reject the authors’ manuscript submission or send it for additional reviewing:
- if the manuscript does not match the journal’s subject area and (or) its originality is under 90 percent (as per the software system Antiplagiat’s report); the manuscript authors will be provided with the text check results note;
- if the Antiplagiat’s report contains suspicious information about the text fully generated by artificial intelligence;
- if the manuscript content does not meet the criteria of a research rationale, novelty, and scientific merit of the obtained findings;
- if the authors miss the deadline of revising the manuscript and (or) there are no grounds for the authors disagreeing with the reviewer’s comments.
The authors receive an opinion on reasons for their manuscript rejection (Appendix 4).
The manuscript registration can be canceled if the authors voluntarily withdraw it from the journal in writing (Appendix 5).
Final assessment
After the decision on the manuscript to be published is made, it undergoes literary and copy editing. Some changes in the manuscript, which can hinder the author’s message completeness, are to be agreed. The authors also approve the research article layout.
The authors’ materials, including literary and copy edits, are stored in the journal’s editorial office as archival for three years.
Then the research articles are uploaded in the section Online First (on the journal’s website https://reggeomet.elpub.ru/) after all the stages of expert assessment completed and the authors approving the article layout, which reduces the publication data and grants faster access to the current research findings.
The only difference of research articles in the section Online First from those in Current is the lacking volume and issue numbers, and cited pages.
After being approved for press, there are added only relevant volume and issue numbers, and cited pages in the bibliographic entry for citation; only then the Current section contains the research article details.
Publishing Ethics
The Editorial Board and Editorial Council of the journal Regional Geology and Metallogeny (thereinafter — editorial office) adhere to the International Code of Research Ethics specifically embedded in the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). In publishing, the editorial office follows internationals copyright protection rules, current statutory regulations of the Russian Federation, international publishing standards. In order to avoid malpractice in publishing (plagiarism, misinterpretations, etc.), to ensure high quality of research articles, public recognition of the author’s research findings, each member of the Editorial Board and Editorial Council, author, reviewer, and representatives of the Publishing House and Printing House engaged in publishing ought to follow ethical standards, regulations, and rules, and take reasonable measures to prevent their violations.
Violation of research ethics principles
If the authors violate research ethics principles (plagiarism, concurrent submission, duplicate papers, etc.), the editorial office takes the following steps:
- If the violation is detected post factum, all the texts violating research ethics principles (when, for example, the editorial office receives duplicate, plagiarized papers, etc.) will be removed from the journal issues and its electronic copies on the website, in the Scientific electronic library, and other databases and information systems.
- The editorial office will appeal to the Committee on Publication Ethics for checking the author’s (composite authors’) all published materials over ten years. The detected ethics violations will force the editorial office to retract all the research articles from the journal, databases, and information systems; the research articles will not be cited.
- The editorial office will veto research paper submission from the author (composite authors), who has (have) violated research ethics principles, for one year.
- The editorial office’s responsibilities
- To foster members of the Editorial Board, Editorial Council, authors, reviewers, representatives of the Publishing House and Printing House to perform as per the given requirements.
- To follow the annual publishing plan. The research articles are published in order of submission priority, after filling the journal sections or its thematic issues.
Publication decision
- To be responsible for publicizing the authors’ manuscripts. When accepting the manuscript for publication, to consider data credibility and scientific value of the paper. The final decision whether to publish the research article primarily depends on the current law regulations of defamation, copyright, and plagiarism.
Decency
- To evaluate the intellectual content of manuscripts irrespective of the authors’ race, gender, sexual orientation, religious views, origin, citizenship, or political preferences.
- To present information about the research funding if the authors provide such in the manuscript.
- To send the author manuscript for the authors to revise as per reviewers’ comments; the authors should provide their updated manuscript (edited as per the reviewer’s comments) and peer review report response.
- To upload the research article open access if it is accepted for publication; the authors retain the copyright.
Confidentiality
- To ensure confidentiality of any data that the manuscript authors have provided prior to publication. Unless necessary, not to disclose any information obtained from the manuscript authors to the third party prior to publication. Unless necessary, not to disclose any information to the third party except for the authors, reviewers, potential reviewers, and publisher. Only the reviewer’s statement about the data incredibility and falsified information from the research paper evidences a confidentiality breach.
- Not to use the unpublished manuscript materials to advantage without the authors’ written consent and not to disclose information from the paper for personal gain.
Publication supervision
- To take reasonable measures to detect and prevent publications of research articles, whose findings demonstrate improper conduct, to discourage, and not to close their mind to such violations.
- To always publish corrections, clarifications, refutations, and apologies when necessary. A corrigendum or erratum note in the published paper, which does not affect its integrity and scientific value, is posted on the journal’s website as per the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics[1], [2].
- To obtain the authors’ approval of some changes in the paper, which can hinder the author’s message completeness (after literary and copy editing). To take measures to eliminate all the content, grammatical, stylistic, and other errors as found.
- To reject the authors’ manuscript submission or send it for additional reviewing if the paper does not match the journal’s subject area and (or) its originality is under 90 percent; if its content does not meet the criteria of a research rationale, novelty, and scientific merit of the obtained findings; if the authors miss the deadline of revising the manuscript and (or) there are no grounds for the authors disagreeing with the reviewer’s comments.
- To cancel the manuscript registration if the authors refuse to revise it or voluntarily withdraw it from the journal in writing.
- To retract the paper if there are proofs of substantial errors that question the data unreliability: plagiarism, unreliable research findings, mistaken and falsified statements, fabrication, and data falsification. The papers are retracted as per the retraction guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics[3].
- Reviewers’ responsibilities
Objectivity
- To perform a peer review of the authors’ materials, thus the reviewer’s opinion should be unbiased.
- To assess the manuscript in terms of the research rationale, novelty and scientific merit of the obtained findings, data description, data presentation, science sources citation, informative value of the abstract, assets of the research paper, limitations of the research paper.
- To state objective and essential comments and recommendations to increase scientific quality of the manuscript.
- To finally advise on the manuscript publication (recommend publishing the manuscript as a research article without changes or after making the reviewer’s major revisions, require additionally reviewing, after making the reviewer’s minor revisions, cannot be published) on the basis of specific facts and produce evidence of their decision.
Confidentiality
- To consider the manuscript for peer review as a confidential document, which cannot be forwarded for examination and discussion to the third party unauthorized by the editorial office to do that.
- To understand that the manuscript for peer review is the authors’ intellectual property and relates to highly confidential information. Only the reviewer’s statement about the data incredibility or falsified information from the manuscript evidences a confidentiality breach.
- Not to use the unpublished manuscript materials to advantage without the authors’ written consent. Information or ideas obtained during the peer review and associated with potential benefits should remain confidential and not be used for personal gain.
- Not to disclose personal data, since the peer review report is confidential. Only the editorial office knows the reviewer’s data.
Efficiency
- To ensure a blind peer review of manuscripts. It is important to follow the single-blind peer review policy when the reviewer knows the authors, but the authors do not know the reviewer.
- To notify the editorial office if the reviewer feels they are not qualified or objective enough to review the manuscript, or they do not have sufficient time to and ask to be excluded from the manuscript peer review.
Primary source recognition
- To draw the attention of the journal’s Editor-in-Chief to the substantial and partial similarity of the assessed manuscript to another paper, as well as proofs of lacking references to this or other authors’ statements, inferences, or arguments.
- To mark published papers not cited in the research article.
Disclosure policy and conflict of interests
- Not to use manuscripts for personal gain.
- Not to apply knowledge about the content of the reviewed paper for their own benefit prior to its publication.
- Not to review a research paper if the reviewer feels, in their opinions, they are not qualified enough to assess the manuscript or they may not be objective when, for example, there is a conflict of interests with the author or organization (ambiguous circumstances, competing interests). The reviewer should inform the editorial office about these conditions and request to be excluded from the manuscript peer review.
- The authors’ responsibilities
Manuscript guidelines
- To be responsible for the manuscript content by providing credible research findings; a priori mistaken or falsified statements are unacceptable.
- To submit only true facts and information in the manuscript; to share sufficient information to be checked and provide other researchers with experiments to be reproduced; not to fabricate or falsify data. The authors should obtain consent to use the materials the manuscript (co)authors do not own the rights to.
- To submit the manuscript as per the journal’s rules and present it as requirements for its structure and layout suggest. There should be the research article metadata (its title; the (co)authors’ first, patronymic, and last names; affiliation: organization, city and country; abstract, keywords, acknowledgments and funding (if available), contribution of the authors, conflict of interest; bibliographic entry for citation).
- To accompany the manuscript with the expert report on open access publication.
- To sign a license agreement after all the expert assessment stages completed. To provide their own personal data (without time limit) to store and process in different databases and information systems, to be included in analytical and statistical reports: first, patronymic, and last names; date of birth, passport details; degree and academic rank, honorary rank; position, full affiliation; office address (street, house number, locality, country, post index); identification numbers (ORCID, Scopus Author ID, ResearcherID, RSCI SPIN-code); contact telephone number, e-mail address; date of birth, passport details.
- To respect the work of the editorial office and reviewers, and timely revise the manuscript as per the reviewers’ comments, or provide grounds for the authors disagreeing with the reviewer’s comments.
- To inform the editorial office about the voluntary withdrawal of the manuscript from the journal in writing.
Data access and storage
- To provide primary data on request for reviewing. The authors should be ready to provide open access to such information if possible and always store the data after publication.
Originality and plagiarism
- To ensure that research findings in the manuscript are original. The manuscript should include references to the cited researchers and published sources of the borrowed content as per current statutory regulations of the Russian Federation. Excessive borrowings, as well as any plagiarism, specifically lacking quotations, periphrasis, or arrogating other researchers’ findings are considered unethical and unacceptable. A quotation without a reference relates to plagiarism.
Duplication, excessive, and concurrent publications
- Not to approve concurrent submissions. If some elements of the manuscript have been published before, the authors have to cite an earlier paper and demonstrate how the new paper differs from the previous one.
- Not to submit the manuscript to this journal, which the authors have submitted to another journal and is currently pending; not to submit a research article previously published in a printed and (or) electronic edition.
Primary source recognition
- To recognize the contribution of each person who has therefore affected the research process; specifically, the manuscript should contain references to the publications, which were of importance in the research process.
- Not to use or provide private data without any written consent of the primary data source (for example, in conversation, correspondence, or discussion with the third party).
- Not to use information obtained from confidential sources, such as manuscript assessment or a grant, without any clear written consent from the authors’ research article that pertains to confidential sources.
Publication authorship
- To list all the research contributors as the research article coauthors (to shape the research concept, develop and implement the research, or interpret the research findings). The coauthors cannot be people not involved in the research.
- To let all the coauthors approve the final research paper and agree to its publication layout.
- To follow ethical norms by criticizing or commenting on the third party’s research.
Disclosure policy and conflicts of interest
- To disclose financial or other conflicts of interest regarded as affecting the research findings or inferences. The following is subject to mandatory disclosure: employment, consultancy, equity assets, fees, expert opinions, patent applications or registrations, grants, and other financial support. Potential conflicts of interest should be disclosed as early as possible.
Substantial errors in published papers
- To immediately inform the editorial office if the authors have discovered major or minor errors in the manuscript during its expert assessment or after its publication.
- To provide the editorial office with evidence of the original research article correctness or correct major errors at the earliest possible time if the third party has informed about them. Otherwise, the authors will have to withdraw the research paper.
- The publisher’s responsibilities
- To follow the principles and procedures that foster the journal’s editorial office, reviewers, and authors to perform their ethical responsibilities. The publisher should be convinced that the profit from advertising placement or reprint production has not affected the editorial office’s decision to publish manuscripts.
- To support the editorial office handling claims about ethical aspects of the published materials and assist in collaboration with other scholarly journals and (or) publishing houses if this fact contributes to the editorial office’s responsibilities.
- To facilitate proper research processes and implement industry-specific standards in order to improve ethical guidelines, withdrawal/removal and retraction procedures, as well as erratum and corrigendum.
- To sustain relevant law support (opinion and consultancy) if necessary.
Founder
All-Russian Geological Research Institute of A. P. Karpinsky
Author Fees
Publication in Regional Geology and Metallogeny is free of charge for all the authors.
The journal does not have any article submission or processing charges.
Disclosure and Conflict of Interest
The unpublished materials disclosed in submitted manuscripts must not be used to advantage without the author's written consent. Information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage.
Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.
Plagiarism Detection
Regional Geology and Metallogeny uses the software system Antiplagiat for detecting textual borrowings in research papers. If plagiarism is identified, the COPE guidelines on plagiarism will be followed.
Preprint and Postprint Policy
The editorial office of Regional Geology and Metallogeny allows authors to post the manuscript as a preprint before submission to the journal and to independently archive their articles in subject and institutional repositories.
Preprints
The editorial office of Regional Geology and Metallogeny encourages uploading preprints on preprint servers. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) defines a preprint as 'a scholarly manuscript posted by the author(s) in an openly accessible platform, usually before or in parallel with the peer review process.'
A preprint publication shall not be considered a duplicate publication nor shall it influence the editor's decision to publish it in Regional Geology and Metallogeny.
The author must notify the editorial office of Regional Geology and Metallogeny about the posted preprint at submission of the manuscript to the journal, with a link to the preprint with its DOI identifier and the dissemination terms and conditions provided.
It is the author’s responsibility to add a link to the published manuscript in the preprint record. The link must contain the DOI and the URL of the article published on the journal's website. The original preprint should not be modified as per the reviewer’s and editor’s comments. The preprint should not be replaced with the text of the published article.
Do not delete the preprint text.
Manuscripts accepted for publication
The editorial office of Regional Geology and Metallogeny allows manuscripts, which have been reviewed and are accepted for publication, to be archived independently.
This version of the manuscript may be disseminated through:
- a personal website or blog;
- an institutional repository;
- a subject repository;
- a direct contact with the faculty or students by providing this version of the manuscript for personal use.
The manuscript text should contain the author’s clarifications about its status and information about the planned publication.
Example: Article title has been reviewed, accepted for publication, and will be published in 2025 in Vol. ..., no. ... of Regional Geology and Metallogeny.
Once the final version of the manuscript is published, it is the author’s responsibility to add a link to the published article to the publication record. The posted text should not be modified as per the reviewer’s and editor’s comments. Do not replace the text of the posted manuscript. Do not delete the text of the posted manuscript.
Final versions of manuscripts
The editorial office of Regional Geology and Metallogeny allows manuscripts, which have been peer reviewed, accepted for publication, edited, and ready for publication (proofread and typeset), to be independently archived.
This version of the manuscript may be disseminated through:
- a personal website or blog;
- an institutional repository;
- a subject repository;
- a direct contact with the faculty or students by providing this version of the manuscript for personal use.
Once the final version of the manuscript is published, it is the author’s responsibility to add a link to the published article to the publication record. The posted text should not be modified as per the reviewer’s and editor’s comments. Do not replace the text of the posted manuscript. Do not delete the text of the posted manuscript.
Revenue Sources
The publisher as a parent organization finances the journal publication .
