Next Steps in the Growth of ESSOAr

Seven societies, including AGU, are joining together to further enable open science by officially participating in the governance and continued development of ESSOAr.org, the Earth and Space Open Archive. The societies—Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, Ecological Society of America, Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, as well as three societies in the ACSESS coalition: American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, the Soil Science Society of America—will join AGU on the Advisory Board to provide governance for ESSOAr, guide future development and help populate the Editorial Board that manages the content.

AGU, with the support of Wiley and Atypon, started ESSOAr.org as means for researchers to share preprints and also posters to support open science in 2017. Posters were included because they make up so much of the research presentations, yet there was no standard way to archive and share them. This feature was expanded recently to support all rich meeting presentations. Since it started, ESSOAr has published more than 3,000 preprints, along with more than 2,000 presentations from dozens of meetings. About half of these have been uploaded during the past year, indicating continued growth and acceptance of preprints by the community.

The new partnership model, among these seven societies, will provide stronger direction and continued growth for ESSOAr. Participating societies will also work to enable researchers to directly transfer content from their editorial and/or meeting management systems. Soon, researchers will also be able to submit uploaded preprints from ESSOAr easily to the respective journals. ESSOAr’s scope is expanding to include the environmental sciences and GeoHealth more explicitly. ESSOAr will also now provide a home for important society archives such as position statements and white papers that otherwise were not regularly preserved. AGU and Wiley/Atypon will continue to provide financial support for ESSOAr.

We welcome additional society members interested in supporting open science across the Earth, environmental, and space sciences. Further information about ESSOAr and the new Advisory Board is here: https://www.essoar.org/about Information on how to submit content is here: https://www.essoar.org/submissionguide