The Geosciences Journal was established in October 1991 with support of the Director General of the Geological Survey of Iran after approval of the Minister of Mines and Metals, Mr. Hossein Mahlouji, with "scientific" degree as a "Quarterly". The first volume was published with 9 papers while its Responsible Director was Dr. Mohammad Hashem Emami and its editor in chief was late Dr. Nasser Khouei. At the beginning, number of received papers was small and mostly belonged to the experts of the Geological Survey of Iran.

Publishing the first volume of this journal was confronted with fortuity of geoscientists as well as the Minister of Mines and Metals in such a way that he called its publication as a proud and recommended the journal experts to enrich its content and consider the views of professors and experts.

In the winter 1996, simultaneous with publishing volume 22-21 (Fall and winter 1996), while the Journal of Geosciences passed the fifth year of publication, it succeeded in obtaining a scientific-research degree from the Ministry of Culture and Higher Education and it was inserted on the cover of this volume for the first time.

Forward steps of the young Geosciences Journal continued in such a way that in 2002 it was selected as the leading journal in the field of basic sciences by the evaluators of the Commission for Investigating Scientific Publications of Iran.

In 2009, with establishment of the Islamic World Science Citation Center, simultaneously with publishing Vol. 73, Fall 2009, Geosciences Journal was indexed in ISC as a journal with impact factor. In the same year, Geosciences Journal was listed among the journals existed on Master list of Thomson Reuter affiliated to ISI.

Since 2009, at the same time as being indexed at ISI and ISC, the dedicated site of the Geosciences Journal was launched and it was tried that published papers to be archived and presented in pdf format for public use for free.

Since 2013, based on the announcement of the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology dated 2013/02/22 and the approval of the Ministry of Guidance, Geosciences Journal was changed from printed version to electronic one in order to facilitate accessibility to scientific information, promote journal publication and reduce publishing costs.

In December 2014, due to the large volume of accepted papers that their publications took several months and sometimes years, editorial board decided to publish 2 special volumes in winter and spring 2015, each volume includes four issues namely structural geology, rock and mineral, stratigraphy and sedimentology, engineering geology and the environment. Thus, 246 papers were totally published in two volumes in Winter 2015 (No. 94) and Spring 2015 (No. 95). With this huge and extremely difficult task, the volume of papers waiting to be published dramatically decreased. At present, the maximum waiting time from acceptance to final publication is 6 months on average. The number of papers in each volume increased from 9 papers in the first volume to average of 25 papers.

It is hoped that with better efforts and management of papers, the quality of published papers to be increased and the number of papers, waiting for publishing, to be decreased.

Copyright:  The authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights without restrictions.