About Geo-spatial Information Science

Geo-spatial Information Science

Geo-spatial Information Science (GSIS) is an English-language open-access journal founded in 1998 and sponsored by Wuhan University in Wuhan, Hubei, where its editorial office sits in the Wuhan University Scientific Journals Press; it is published in cooperation with Taylor & Francis. Launched at the former Wuhan Technical University of Surveying and Mapping, it was China's first English journal in the field of surveying, mapping and remote sensing. Its editor-in-chief is Li Deren, an academician of both the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, who has led the journal since 2011. The journal covers photogrammetry, remote sensing, geographic information systems, cartography, geodesy and GNSS, and it was formally included in the Science Citation Index Expanded in September 2020, with its papers available in Web of Science back to its first issue of 2018.

Wuhan is the historic capital of Chinese surveying and mapping — the city whose university of surveying and mapping trained much of the country's geospatial profession. A journal founded there, in English, for the geospatial sciences was an early claim that Chinese work in photogrammetry, remote sensing and GIS should be read internationally; its SCIE inclusion in 2020 was reported by Wuhan University as a significant breakthrough, the university's first English journal to enter SCIE.

Founding at Wuhan's Surveying and Mapping University

GSIS was founded in 1998 at what was then the Wuhan Technical University of Surveying and Mapping — the specialist institution that later merged into Wuhan University. Wuhan University's own account describes GSIS as the first English journal in the field of surveying, mapping and remote sensing in China. The claim is plausible in context: Chinese geospatial science had operated largely in Chinese, and an English journal from the field's leading university was a deliberate instrument for international exchange.

The university supported the journal through China's journal-development programmes: GSIS was funded by the Project for Enhancing International Impact of China STM Journals in 2013 and by the Excellence Action Plan for China STM Journals in 2019 — the national schemes through which China has systematically raised the international standing of its scientific journals. It was also selected as one of China's Most Internationally Influential Academic Journals (top 5 percent) in 2019.

International Publishing with Taylor & Francis

Since 2012, GSIS has worked with the Taylor & Francis Group to adopt an international publishing platform and an open-access publishing model. The journal is jointly published by Taylor & Francis, its current issues and archive are presented on Taylor & Francis Online (the journal's table-of-contents code is tgsi20), and all of its content is open access. The partnership gave a Wuhan-edited journal the production, hosting and marketing of a major international publisher while sponsorship and the editorial office remained at Wuhan University.

The result is a journal that is Chinese in sponsorship and editorship and international in distribution: articles are free to read worldwide, discoverable through the publisher's platform and the databases that index it.

Editor-in-Chief: Li Deren

The journal's editor-in-chief since 2011 is Academician Li Deren of Wuhan University, a scientist of photogrammetry and remote sensing who is a member of both the Chinese Academy of Sciences (elected 1991) and the Chinese Academy of Engineering (elected 1994). Wuhan University credits his leadership with confronting fierce international competition for English journals and setting precise development strategies for GSIS.

Li's standing explains much of the journal's trajectory. Born in 1939, he graduated from the Wuhan Institute of Surveying and Mapping in 1963, took his doctorate at the University of Stuttgart in 1985, proposed the iteration method with variable weights for gross-error location known as the Li Deren Method, and received an honorary doctorate from ETH Zürich in 2008. He served as president of the Wuhan Technical University of Surveying and Mapping, founded the Asia GIS Association, and has published hundreds of papers and multiple books across remote sensing, GPS and GIS. Under associate editors including J. van Genderen of the University of Twente and Alexander Zipf of the University of Heidelberg, and an editorial board reported at the time of SCIE inclusion as fifty-seven members — including seven academicians and forty-seven members from overseas — the journal internationalised its governance under his editorship, and the strategy culminated in SCIE inclusion in 2020.

Scope and Subject Coverage

GSIS publishes high-quality original research articles and timely reviews in the interdisciplinary fields of geo-spatial information science. Its subject territory, as given in the journal's descriptions, covers photogrammetry, remote sensing, geographic information systems, cartography, geodesy and global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). In contemporary terms, that is the science of measuring and representing the Earth and locating things on it: acquiring spatial data from aircraft, satellites, ground sensors and navigation systems; processing imagery and point clouds; building geographic databases and maps; and analysing spatial patterns.

The field sits beneath much of modern environmental and urban science — land-use mapping, disaster monitoring, precision agriculture, infrastructure management and location-based services all depend on it — and a general geospatial journal accordingly publishes methodologically driven work with applications across those domains, from new sensors and algorithms to integrated spatial-data infrastructures.

SCIE Inclusion and Indexing

On 23 September 2020, GSIS was formally included in the Science Citation Index Expanded, with its papers available in the Web of Science database dating back to the first issue of 2018. Wuhan University reported the inclusion as a significant breakthrough: GSIS was the first English journal of Wuhan University to be included in SCIE. Before full inclusion, the journal had been covered in ESCI, GeoBase and Scopus, and it is also listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals and DBLP. Its progression — ESCI to SCIE, Scopus coverage, international-influence listings — is the standard ladder of journal internationalisation, climbed over the decade of Li Deren's editorship.

The 2018 back-coverage point matters for authors: papers published from 2018 onward entered the Web of Science record, so the journal's recent archive carries the indexing that authors and institutions count.

Open Access Model

GSIS is an open-access journal: its articles are immediately and freely available to read online through Taylor & Francis Online. As the university's account puts it, the journal publishes in cooperation with Taylor & Francis "to provide open access (OA)," a model it has followed since the partnership began in 2012. For a methods-heavy field whose practitioners include government mapping agencies, companies and researchers in developing countries, open access widens the journal's usable audience beyond subscribing universities — a practical fit for a discipline whose outputs, such as maps and spatial methods, are public infrastructure.

Readership and Community

The journal's readers are the international geospatial community: photogrammetrists, remote-sensing scientists, GIS specialists, geodesists and cartographers in universities, national mapping and space agencies, and industry. Wuhan's role in that community is outsized: the university's State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing and its geospatial schools are among the world's largest centres of the discipline, and the journal connects that community to its global counterparts.

For readers, GSIS offers peer-reviewed Chinese geospatial research in English — research from the country that operates extensive Earth-observation satellite programmes and one of the world's largest surveying and mapping establishments — alongside international contributions attracted by its open-access platform and, since 2020, its SCIE standing.

Place in Chinese Geospatial Publishing

GSIS holds two distinctions in its national system: it was China's first English journal in surveying, mapping and remote sensing, and it carried Wuhan University into SCIE with an English journal for the first time. Its development was nationally supported at each stage — the 2013 international-impact project, the 2019 excellence action plan, the 2019 top-5-percent international-influence listing — making it a case study in China's deliberate, funded strategy of building internationally indexed English journals from its strongest research universities.

Its editorship by one of China's most decorated geospatial scientists, an academician of both national academies who helped define the field's theory in China, gives the journal a personal as well as institutional authority unusual among specialist journals.

Access and Identification

GSIS is published on Taylor & Francis Online (tandfonline.com, journal code tgsi20), where its current issues and open-access archive are found. It is sponsored by Wuhan University, with its editorial office in the Wuhan University Scientific Journals Press, Wuhan, Hubei.

Founded in 1998 at China's surveying and mapping university, China's first English journal in its field, open access with Taylor & Francis since 2012, led since 2011 by Academician Li Deren and indexed in SCIE since September 2020, Geo-spatial Information Science stands as Wuhan University's flagship contribution to the international literature of photogrammetry, remote sensing, GIS, cartography, geodesy and GNSS.