Supporting All Authors through Openness and Integrity

By Matthew Giampoala, AGU’s vice president of publications 

As we mentioned previously, AGU remains committed and has taken numerous actions to show our strong support for open access, including:

1. Making 96% of our content free.
2. Setting all new journals to be open access.
3. Providing AGU Digital Library (digitized journal content starting in 1997) as an additional benefit for all individual members starting in January 2020.
4. Being Plan S compliant through transitional deals and open access options for all journals.

Further, we operate as a non-profit and support authors who have no source of funding for publishing. No matter one’s funding source, AGU maintains a mixed model so that all can be represented to advance Earth and space science. This is especially important since about 10% of the papers published by AGU are listed without a major funder. Our community expects and trusts science societies like AGU to provide high integrity, high quality articles, which are made possible because we incentivize peer reviews and implement quality assurance measures.

We value and support our authors, reviewers, members and everyone else on whom our scientific enterprise relies and depends on. We need a robust system that meets our joint needs of openness and integrity.

In sum, AGU supports increasing access to the scholarly outputs that will secure and support the research enterprise broadly. We encourage an open process toward that goal that engages societies who have deep experience in scholarly communication and outreach, including in publishing, versus a closed process that might risk unintended consequences.