AGU’s December 2021 Board meeting wrap up

By: AGU Staff on 20 January 2022 at 10:00 am

By Corey Garza, Director, AGU Board

The AGU Board met 10 December 2021 in New Orleans, ahead of #AGU21.

The first half of the meeting focused on a discussion of how to improve access to science, equity in science and the models of science that we are using, including the knowledge structures that we draw from and the types of impact that we have.

We started our morning with a beautiful view of the Mississippi River, with a welcome from our President Susan Lozier, President-Elect Lisa J. Graumlich and CEO/Executive Director Randy W. Fiser. Each offered a perspective on how we could begin to improve connections between leadership and the broader AGU membership, including:

how to more fully embrace solution science while maintaining the basic science focus of AGU
how to re-envision graduate education with diversity, equity and inclusion
how to reimagine tenure, promotion and reward processes within academia
how to bring change to the AGU Honors program
how to bring AGU staff back into the headquarters building

In the same spirit, we also talked about how we could begin to improve access to publications and meetings, including discussion topics of local authorship and journals, grey literature and improving communication to non-scientists.

Next, the board engaged in an in-depth discussion around a framework and principles for improving access to publications and meetings. They are as follows:

Beneficence: Maximize benefits and avoid harm
Justice
Respect for persons
Expand and refine model for science
Use power and privileged resources and create new forms of science
Be intentional
Integrate across initiatives

We had a robust discussion that focused on three key topics around improving access:

For whom are we improving access?
How will we do this?
How can we benefit our target audiences by improving access?

The board agreed this was a worthwhile effort and looked forward to seeing how these efforts unfold.

Finally, as we met, the board also discussed how to be an ambassador at the upcoming Fall Meeting, approved AGU’s 2022 operating budget and discussed the 2022 operating plan.