Editor’s desk This issue of Preview is the first issue to be produced with our new publishing partners,Taylor & Francis. Needless to say, there have been teething problems, but we are working on resolving these problems and hope that the next issue of Preview will hit your inbox/mail box in a timely fashion. If you are one of Preview’s valued advertisers and you haven’t been contacted byTaylor & Francis staff please email me (previeweditor@aseg.org.au) or Roger Massey, theTaylor & Francis Business Development Manager (Roger.Massey@ informa.com). Please also get in touch if you are new to Preview but would like to take advantage of the opportunity to advertise in our new global environment. One of the advantages of engaging with Taylor & Francis is that they regularly update the ASEG Publications Team about global developments in scientific publishing. In January 2019 Marina Costelloe, Ted Tyne and I participated in a Taylor & Francis webinar/briefing on“Plan S”, a plan which is being developed by a coalition of European public research funders (www.coalition-s.org). Plan S sprang into life late in 2018 and aims to achieve full and immediate open access to publicly funded research outputs from 2020, with a view to disseminating knowledge more effectively and facilitating the rapid progress of research. According to the developers, the long-term consequences of the widespread adoption of Plan S include changing the rewards and incentives structures that underpin academia, and making scholarly publishing more efficient and transparent. The developers also believe that adoption may, ultimately, end the subscription model of publishing. So how does Plan S work? In a nutshell, researchers who receive funding from Plan S signatories will need to publish in: • a fully open access journal • an open-access platform • and/or make the accepted or final version of manuscripts freely available without embargo in compliant repositories under liberal reuse terms. A number of funding bodies have already signed up to Plan S, mostly within Europe, including the United Kingdom Research Institute, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, the Research Council of Norway and the Austrian Science Fund. Outside of Europe, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has formally signed up, and there has been support expressed by China’s National Science Library, National Science and Technology Library and the Natural Science Foundation of China. According to Taylor & Francis, Australian public funding bodies are yet to make the call. Globally there has been a steady move to open access publishing so researchers who are funded by Plan S signatories will have no shortage of open access journals, including all the European Geosciences Union journals. Preview is also open access as the magazine is freely available online https://www.tandfonline. com/toc/texp20/current. Good news for publicly funded Preview contributors! We’ll keep you informed as Plan S develops. Back to the current issue of Preview, which features an article by Roger Henderson on“The second lecturer in exploration geophysics in Australia – later to become Surveyor General of India”This article follows on from Roger’s article on the first lecturer in exploration geophysics in Australia – which was published in the April 2016 issue of Preview (PV 180). In addition, our regular commentators have been busy. David Denham (Canberra observed) takes a close look at the performance of resource-based companies in 2018. Michael Asten (Education matters) introduces us to Geoff McNamara, an outstanding science educator who has developed a Science Mentors scheme in the ACT. Mike Hatch (Environmental geophysics) reflects on changes in the practice of environmental geophysics over the past 25 years. Terry Harvey (Minerals geophysics), who is also in a reflective mood (holidays can do that for you), muses about the poor public image of mining and exploration in Australia. Mick Micenko (Seismic window) despairs about the poor public image of fracking. Tim Keeping (Data trends) keeps the conversation about passive seismic file formats going, and Dave Annetts (Webwaves) brings us up to speed with the debate around encryption. Finally, Roger Henderson (who has been very busy!) treats us to a review of the book “The Spinning Magnet: The force that created the modern world – and could destroy it” by Alanna Mitchell. Roger is also reading “The Hunt for Earth Gravity: A history of gravity measurement from Galileo to the 21st Century” so watch out for that review in an upcoming issue of Preview. Lisa Worrall Preview Editor previeweditor@aseg.org.au 1 PREVIEW Editor’s desk FEBRUARY 2019