 For those of you who've heard this three times already, I'm sorry, but my name is Chloe Hill. I am the EGU's policy officer and the EGU office will be hosting this webinar today, which basically means my job is just to welcome you all to talk about two minutes and then I'll hand it over to our panellists. This is actually the very first webinar that EGU has ever hosted. So we're very excited about that. This also means that we'd love to get your feedback on today as well. So tomorrow we'll actually be sending around a follow-up email to everyone who participated and there will be a link to a really short survey. So if you do have the time and you want to give this survey a bit of this webinar a little bit of feedback, that would be really great. In that email will also attach all of the PowerPoint presentations that you'll see today. So we'll be hosting webinars from the hosted by the EGU office probably quarterly. This is going to be based on our journals, our publications. And one of the reasons we're focusing on this for the first webinar is because it is a really important aspect of the EGU. So we do have a really exciting lineup today, panellists. The first panelist will be Martin Rasmussen and he is the Managing Director of Copernicus. So he'll explain a little bit more about how you work with Copernicus and how the journals work because they really do work through Copernicus. The second speaker is Katja Fennell who is the Chair of the EGU Publications Committee and also the Professor of Oceanography at the Dalhousie University. So she'll be talking a little bit more about the Publications Committee and how that works and also a bit more about the journals more generally speaking. And the final speaker we have today is Alberto Montanari. So for those of you who don't know, Alberto is the President of the EGU. He's also a Professor of Water Engineering and Hydrology at the University of Bologna. So he'll be talking today about something very exciting, the EGU sphere. So it is very new and you'll be some of the first people to hear about it. So that is at the end of the webinar today. After all the speakers have finished, we'll actually have a Q&A session then. So as the webinar goes on today, you should be able to type any questions you have below. You should have a Q&A little box that you can ask any questions and after the speakers have finished after about half an hour or so, we'll be having about 15 minutes of Q&A time. So really do feel free to ask any questions and yeah, I hope you really enjoy it. So on that note, I will hand over to the first speaker, Martin. For us from my side, a warm welcome to this first webinar. I will switch to my presentation directly to keep the time. And this is about EGU's Interactive Op-Maxis Strategy. We have to think about this since EGU was in the early years of 2001, when EGU started the first Op-Maxis and Interactive Op-Maxis Journals. One of the very first, especially from the LERD associations. And until today, this has really been a success story. So the first dimension of Op-Maxis, that's the reason why we call it Op-Maxis 1.0, is of course the free access to the paper. Fortunately, nowadays, most people know about it and know the concept. Just to remind you or if you are newer in this business, just to let you know. The magic about Op-Maxis is that we use these Creative Commons licenses. This is an initiative based in San Francisco. It comes originally from the photo community, where it was relatively early, the idea of sharing information and not saying copyright or rights reserved, no distribution. So Creative Commons has a very easy understandable set of licenses. Please feel free to Google yourself. There are various aspects and you can stick them together as you like it, and it's very easy to understand them. Nowadays, the most common distribution license of Creative Commons is attribution. Attribution means that everybody around the world is free to share, to copy, to redistribute the material without asking permission, and to adapt the work, to remix it, to transform, to build upon it. There's only one right reserved. Namely, you have to name it in an author, which is anyway good scientific practice when you cite the authors. That's it. That's attribution. At the moment, it's attribution 4.0 international, also called CCBuy. Please have a look. You also see that my presentation is under CCBuy, so please feel also free to share my presentation. Yes, please. I cannot see your slides. You cannot see my slides. No. I'm sorry. I... Okay, I'm sorry. I started... Okay, now, so here I am. Okay. So, again, this was what I was talking about. The Creative Commons attribution license, where you share and adapt as much as you want with anyone. And the good thing is, when you see an article with an author copyright, not the publisher's copyright, and with a CCBuy attribution distribution license, you can use the content and citing the author. You don't have to ask for permission. We still get tons of reproductive requests for figures and so on. You don't need this. You just have to cite the author. So, of course, in an Open Access Word, the question is always, yeah, but how do you get this finance because there's no subscription coming anymore? And, yes, we have what we call article processing charges, the APCs. In EGU Journals, on average, it's 1,200 euros per article, but this depends on the length of the article. So, as an author, especially for early career scientists, please feel free to write shorter papers and then you save money. But it's also important to say that, of course, for new Journals, we waive the APCs. We only start taking APCs or charging APCs when a journalist is established. And EGU offers 10% free pages. This is not based only on your origin. It's really for authors lacking support of funds. And it's also important to say that we have nowadays many universities and also research centers like all Max Planck Institute, all Seymour Institute and Leipniz, but also around 30 universities in Europe and the US. And they settle the APCs centrally with us. So, as an author, if you belong to one of these institutions, you will not ask by us to pay any APCs. So, we continuously invest efforts into making this easier and easier for authors. The second dimension of Open Access, because we now have the content freely accessible. And then for EGU, it was a logical step to say, hey, but then we should also bring the people earlier into the process, not after publication, before publication. So, to make the peer review publicly accessible. And this is what EGU is doing with all journals, except for the special publication series, Advances in Geoscience, but all other topical journals are like this nowadays. That means, as an author, you submit, you find a journal editor, and the journal editor ensures that at least your manuscript meets basic scientific criteria. But then, very quickly, it goes onto the web as a preprint. At the moment, we still call it discussion paper, but it is a preprint, which is directly accessible for everybody. You have your copyright on it, there's a DOI on it, so your idea will not be stolen, but it's publicly available. And then, we invite referees to comment on your paper. We invite the public community, the scientific community to comment on the paper. And of course, you as an author can always reply to comments or post ideas yourself. And ideally, we have here a nice discussion going on before the final journal publication. So everybody can get involved in shaping the article. And then there's a revision, maybe editors might ask editor referees again, and at the end, you have your classical, we call it final revised journal article, fully cited, fully peer reviewed, but this whole part of your preprint and the public discussion will stay online, and people can refer to it later. The idea to do this was to say, we want to enhance the quality insurance by bringing transparency into it. And also, good effect, if we make it public from the very first beginning, we aim to have better submissions, and this preserves reviewer capacities, and you know this better than me, that reviewer capacities nowadays, the crucial point. And of course, for referees, we still keep the idea of asking them whether they want to stay anonymous. Whereas for authors in the public, these comments are never anonymous, but the referees can decide whether or not they want to stay anonymous. This is our second dimension of Open Access. And this here is just an example from the journal BG, Biogeosciences, how long does this whole process takes? Here you see it, this is from the last 12 months, the media over all the papers published in BG, and you can see that the whole process from the very first manuscript submission through the public discussion, which is normally eight weeks, authors revision, reevaluation, and then the publication takes 170 days. Whereas a large part, at least eight weeks, is a public discussion where people can get involved into the review of your paper. Then our third dimension, and this is also very important to say this, is that we continuously encourage people to not only publish the journal article, but to really publish the entire scientific research output by saying my data sets, my model code, the videos. This is all scientific output, and it should be hosted in reasonable sites like data repositories, software repositories, all linked through DOIs, so therefore making much more out of your research than just, in quotes, just the research paper in the journal. And this is, in principle, what we offer when you publish with EGU. Of course, you must not be a late-age author. We have 40% late-age authors, but we also have, luckily, 60% word authors. You can also compile your articles using R if you are from this community, and we always make sure that we meet all the peer review standards. We bring transparency into it. We have an XML-first workflow, including masterminds so that your entire paper is machine-readable. You get a good image processing and also language copy editing in English to integrate authors from all around the world and language should not be a barrier. And then, of course, we publish in full-text XML and full-text HTML and also PDF, and we ensure, of course, that your article is long-term preserved like in Portugal clocks or other national libraries. The journals, the topical journals are also all index and web of science with high impact factors. I know that the journal impact factor is not the most important measurement, but for funders and maybe your boss or your thesis supervisor, it is. So, therefore, we ensure that we do our best to have a high reputation and a high visibility. And this is just my last slide to show you that IGU cares a lot about ethics because this has been an ongoing discussion in Open Access Publishing and there's this term, predatory publishing, where people say, hey, Open Access, I pay for my article so I can buy myself a publication where it's a quality assurance and be ensured that our journals, besides putting the peer review online and making it transparent, all journals and members of the committee on publication ethics and all our journals got also the DOHA seal. If you have time, please take a look on the website. It's very important. And of course, also if there are conflicts, especially for early career scientists when they are new in the process and they have edit us and there are conflicts who have an ombudsman for this so we can talk about it and we ensure that we have a good balance in terms of gender, career stages and also origin of the authors and the referees. So that's a quick overview of the publication strategy from my side. I thank you very much for your attention. Chloe, you're muted. Still muted. All right, thanks, Man. So I'm just gonna go straight on to catch you now so we keep the flow going. And again, any questions? We just have one question but any questions that you have, we can answer towards the end, so. Being here, thank you, Martin, for this great overview. I'm gonna follow on and sort of say a few more words on some of the aspects that Martin already talked about. So let's sort of start off by looking at what the EGU actually has in terms of journals. So here are the little icons of all the 19 journals. They're 19 journals in total published by the EGU. Some numbers from 2018 to give you an idea of the scope. So in 2018, there were 5,000 articles published in total. We have about 1,000 editors involved in these various journals. 9,000 referees participated in the review process and in total 25,000 authors have published in these journals. So it's a big operation. 19 journals, some of them have already been around for 10, 20 years, but the EGU also from time to time starts new journals. And here on this slide, you can see the two newest ones that were started recently, shown a little bit bigger, geochronology and weather and climate dynamics. Now, Martin already pointed out that in principle, publication of an article involves a fee, article processing fee, except if you're in one of the institutions that has a special arrangement already, this Copernicus. Now, these newly started journals offer you the opportunity to publish without a fee for the first few years. So until the journals are registered and index and have an impact factor, you have an opportunity to publish for free in these. So if you're an early career scientist, maybe that is an attractive thing to know about. So Martin already mentioned that this is not only giving you open access, visibility, it's also giving you quality. And I wanted to sort of demonstrate this a bit by showing the impact factors for the five largest EGU journals. And by largest, I mean here, those that publish the most pages per year. The largest by far is atmospheric chemistry and physics and it has an impact factor of 5.7. This is an open access journal. It has a relatively low rejection rate, but that does not mean that the quality of the journal is substandard. On the contrary, the impact factors, the citation rates, they all prove that this is a very successful model in terms of publishing. So atmospheric chemistry and physics has hydrology and earth system science is the second largest biogeosciences where I'm an executive editor is the third geoscientific model development and the cryosphere. So these are the five largest. They have a large impact as these impact factors show. And as I said, they have low rejection rates. They're well below 20%. They vary a bit from journal to journal. They vary a bit from year to year obviously, but overall they're very low. So the EGU also does a lot of work to further improve the impact of your work if you're publishing in these journals. So the EGU puts out journal highlights in the monthly newsletter and also maintains Twitter feeds for all, not for all the journals, but for the 13 that are shown here on this slide. So note where the articles are highlighted in the monthly newsletter. I have included a link here to the latest newsletter. And if you scroll down just a little bit on that link, you can see this journal corner where several recent articles from different journals are highlighted. I mentioned already 13 of these journals on Twitter, updates on newly published articles made public through this outlet. And in order to see these different Twitter feeds, you can go to this link on the bottom there in the bullet list. Now Chloe asked me to talk a little bit about the Publications Committee and how that works. So the Publications Committee is comprised of all the executive editors of these 19 EGU journals. We meet at least twice a year. And really it's an opportunity for us to coordinate activities and to collaborate. So if you've published in EGU journals before, maybe in different EGU journals, you may have noticed that there's a little bit of difference from journal to journal. There's certainly some specific applications approaches in the different journals, but overall the approach and the philosophy is the same. So we very much coordinate and make sure that we are on the same page and pushing forward sort of this vision of open access publishing. At these meetings, we discuss issues ranging from technical to ethical. At the last Publications Committee meeting in the fall, one of the big topics we spent quite a bit of time on was the implementation of EGU Sphere, which is a very exciting new development. And Alberto in a moment will tell you more about what it means for you. I do wanna emphasize something that I believe Martin said already, the executive editors as well as all the other editors and reviewers, we serve without pay. So really it's a service by scientists for scientists. It is a big sort of distinguishing characteristic if you compare to the commercial publishers where a corporation basically makes big profits. Here, any profit that is made through the Publications goes back to the EGU, to the community. It allows the EGU to support early career scientists, support topical workshops and meetings, a range of activities that the EGU engages in. So this really is a service by the community for the community. Now you might ask, okay, it's run by scientists, that's great, but what if something goes wrong? I just wanna spend a few moments to talk about what happens if you feel something goes wrong. So there is an EGU code of conduct and I invite you to check this out, especially if you are sort of an early career scientist, a young scientist, it's educational to be aware. There are rules of conduct for the editors, for the authors and the reviewers. So the EGU and all the activities it carries out do strive for the highest scientific and ethical standards. And it's laid out in this document. So one example as an author that I maybe can spend a few more words on is, what happens if you submitted a paper, it was reviewed and in the end it was rejected and you feel that it wasn't a fair process, that something went wrong in this review process. Authors can appeal decisions. So they would typically write an appeal and submit it to the executive editors of the journal there that's concerned. And typically this really is about scientific disagreements, right? Where an author and reviewers maybe have different scientific interpretations and it's absolutely fine to appeal a decision and provide the scientific arguments for why this may not have been the right decision. It's rare that there's misconduct and in fact, if you find yourself in this situation, I would advise to focus on the scientific arguments and not accuse anybody of misconduct prematurely. Now, if an issue cannot be resolved, the chair of the Publications Committee serves as the onwards person. So that would be me in this case and I can assure you I'm committed to fair treatment and the highest ethical and scientific standards. So I do believe we have a good process in place here. And with that, I will pass over the microphone and the screen sharing to Alberto to hear more about EGU sphere. You Katia, thank you very much. And let me say first that I'm very excited by this opportunity to present during the first EGU webinar. I'm now sharing my presentation, which has Katia anticipated focuses on the last idea that we had, which is EGU sphere. We are, first of all, let me clarify and highlight that EGU is a bottom-up organization. We listen from our community. We try to collect forward-looking ideas from our members. And during our history, and in particular during the past years, we got from the community the suggestion, the ideas of promoting mentoring programs, promoting virtual networking in order to reduce the impact of EGU events. And also we got the idea of making an attempt to organize all the knowledge that is collected by EGU in a systematic and easy to track way. And by putting together these ideas, we elaborated the concept of EGU sphere. What is EGU sphere? In essence, it's a repository, but actually is more than that. It's also wants to be also a kind of social media, a place where EGU contributions can be discussed. And so we can call it an organized repository to share knowledge about Earth, space and planetary science and wants to be a unique container, as I said. Anything that is published by EGU will go into EGU sphere in an organized way. And what are we collecting? We are collecting their abstracts of contributions submitted to EGU events. Actually they are already collected in the websites of each single event, but as I said, we want to put all of them together in a unique place. And abstracts are linked to the subsequent presentations, which can be posters, picocorals with no distinction. We give the same value to any kind of presentation to EGU events. And usually after presentation, we aim to publish papers, to publish papers on our contributions. And these papers can be published on EGU journals, but also on other journals, or can be published as prep reads, with no intention to submit later. We are collecting all of that. So basically after the presentation, we collect reviewed what we called reviewed preprints. These are contributions submitted to EGU journals, according to our model that was illustrated by Martin. And they undergo in the EGU sphere, the public review process. But we are also collected simple preprints. They may be papers submitted to other journals, or just preprints that are submitted there in order to get feedback from the community in order to give visibility to the contribution. So in essence, EGU sphere is bringing together what EGU and other providers are already offering. A repository, a place to discuss, and a unique container for our knowledge. The distinguishing feature of EGU sphere, we want to be the discussion. The discussion that is extended to is allowed for presentation, not for abstract, but it's allowed for presentations, poster, pickle, and orange. It's allowed, of course, for reviewed preprints, according to the EGU public scheme model, and it's allowed for preprints. And the aim of the discussion, of course, is to get a feedback. And especially for presentation, I think this is an exciting, innovative, and unique opportunity. So our members, our contributors will be allowed to submit presentations to EGU sphere before actually the presentation takes place. So there is the opportunity, if we are presenting a poster for instance at the General Assembly, to submit it earlier to get some feedback earlier. There is the opportunity to upload a revised version. And after the presentation, there is, of course, the opportunity to get more feedback. And I think this is also a way to encourage virtual networking, which is something that we really aim to push you. And I think it's also a great opportunity for organizing in EGU sphere mentoring programs, because once you are admitted to a mentoring program of EGU, then the mentor may organize, stimulate the discussion. The mentor may then make a synthesis of the discussion in agreement, of course, and in cooperation with the mentee. So this is a detail in the slide of what we can submit. Abstracts with no comments, no discussion. But then as I said, we can submit presentations with or without comments. Authors can opt out from the discussion if they just want to give visibility to the presentation, but for some reasons, they don't want to get involved in a discussion. Of course, the discussion may take time, maybe too early, maybe too early. So people are allowed to opt out. And as I said, the discussion takes place in the same way for authors, posters, and decos. We can submit their preprints without journal submission, also in this case, with or without comments. And then we can submit their preprints submitted to journals. So when we submit to the journal, actually the paper to the EGU journal, actually the paper goes to EGU sphere. It's open to comment from the public according to the EGU model, according to the transparent peer review concept. And if the preprints is submitted to a journal, of course, the discussion is managed by a scientific editor, which is selected as in our current models. The users to EGU sphere must log in. Comments are not anonymous. With the exception, of course, of the comment by the reviewers for preprints submitted to journals. In this case, the reviewers, according to our model, have the option to be anonymous. And this is the only exception in EGU sphere, only for referees of paper submitted to journals. And of course, like in any repository, there is the option to report any e-views. EGU, of course, reserves the right to remove comments. There is also a quality assurance process that will be set up in order to make sure that all the materials published in EGU sphere is published in agreement with our ethical principles, our code of conduct, and is effectively a meaningful contribution. And in the bottom of the slide, you can see all the type of contributions that we can submit. Now, what is the innovative value? As I already mentioned, it will be a unique container for all the EGU knowledge and will be organized. There will be search tools. We can search for keywords, et cetera. And I think this is a great opportunity in order to give to our knowledge, organize status and also in order to make sure that our knowledge will be long lasting in time. We will collect all the preprints in the EGU sphere submitted to EGU journals in a unique place. Again, I think this is really helpful for transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary studies. EGU sphere will collect the presentation at EGU, as I said, and they can be posted in advance and in order to get preliminary feedback. And we will organize the EGU sphere discussions maybe in the context of mentoring programs, maybe in the context of other initiatives. For instance, we may host their virtual meetings and also the discussion will take place, of course, in EGU sphere. Again, it is an incentive to virtual networking a step forward to virtual and greener meetings. Just to give you an example of online appearance, I decided to take the example of reviewed preprints and they are primarily posted on EGU sphere. We are writing primarily because the process of collecting the EGU sphere, contribution submitted to EGU journals will be a smooth process which will take place at subsequent times. And each journal will show a library tab preprints, formerly it was called discussion forum, which will be linked to the corresponding page of the journal in EGU sphere. And of course, there will be an introductory sentence in the journal stating that each journal lists only the EGU sphere preprints that are being related to its subject areas. And once the paper's contributions are accepted for journal publication, they will be produced and published like in our current model. And EGU sphere will show the preprint, the peer review and the link to the journal article. And the journal will show the journal article, the peer review, the transparent peer review and the links to the preprints in EGU sphere. This is in essence what we are aiming to. And of course, we are fully aware that we need the cooperation of the community to make this experience successful. I am convinced that this could be really a step forward, a further step forward to innovation, a step forward to an improved networking within our community, a step forward towards greener meetings, greener networking. Of course, we need your cooperation and this is why we are also giving visibility to this initiative in advance. When we read the EGU sphere, we are planning to activate it in late spring. And of course, we will inform the community. I would like to thank you very much for your attention. And once again, let me say that I am very excited by this opportunity. And I really think that these webinars may be another option for getting ideas from the community. So I'm really looking forward to your feedback also on this new initiative of launching these webinars within EGU. Thank you very much. One of the questions we had was to Martin. And it says, hi, I have just two papers. Can I be a reviewer? So Martin, maybe you want to clarify this. Yeah. So I say yes, because the question is you have two papers, but I guess that if these papers were published in the course of your PhD thesis, then of course you have done a lot of research. You have a lot of papers you read your own. And regarding reviewers, I can only encourage people to start as early as possible being a reviewer. For editors, of course, it's a bit different. And before a scientist joins an editorial board, of course there are some boundary conditions, but for reviewers, please feel free. If you get a call or a colleague asks you, then respond to this. You can learn a lot. I mean, you will see brand new research and you can also learn a lot for yourself and for your scientific work, because you're not alone. It's the editor who handles the review process and supervises it. So don't be afraid. Okay. We had another question from Ahmed who put his hand up but didn't actually type anything down. So Ahmed, if you want to type something down, that would be great. And actually, looking at it, there aren't any other unanswered questions. But if anyone else, I have a couple of questions that I'll start answering. I'll start giving those myself. But if anyone else has any other unanswered questions, feel free to type those down now. Actually, we do have one more that's just opened. Does earth system science data not have an EGU journal? Yeah. I can answer this. So earth system science data, when we started it in 2008 as the first, by the way, data publishing journal ever in the earth and environmental sciences. And this was an initiative by the International Polar Year. And in those days, we saw that bringing data publication as a brand new feature of the publishing market, it should be as open as possible. And so we went to the EGU. We went also to the AGU, to the AOGS and others to make it really a combined effort. AGU was not so convinced. They said they will do their own stuff. With EGU, since we had this marriage between EGU and Copernicus, it was very easy. So ESSD is not owned by EGU. But as you can imagine, the communities are very much overlapping. And thanks to the EGU journals, there are a number of interjournal special issues, as we call them. So where two or more journals organize a special issue together. And when you see ESSD, and you look at those special issues, you will see that they have done things with ACP, with AMT, but also with Ocean Science and GMD. And so for us at Copernicus, we don't think in competition, we think more on collaboration. And so therefore, although it's not officially an EGU journal, I think it fits well to the EGU journal family in a way that it's a specific data publication series. Okay, good answer. So there's no more questions just yet. I'm actually got his answer. So thank you. I'll ask my question. And if any other questions pop up, I'll also ask those. My question would be, if someone must become one of the editors of a journal, how would they all, or even to join the Publications Committee, for example, how would they go about that? I don't know. Katja wants to answer it or Martin or. I can talk to that. So it is possible to self nominate. So if you feel like you have enough experience, you're motivated to sort of step into those shoes of an editor. It's very much encouraged to self nominate yourself, contact the executive editors of the journal or journals you would be interested in serving for. It's not an automated automatic process, obviously. So the executive editor will evaluate the fit will evaluate whether there actually is a need for another editor in that particular topic area. So they may not, they may not follow through, but they shouldn't prevent, prevent somebody from putting themselves out there and putting themselves forward. That's what I would say. Okay. We have one more question. I think this one probably is directed more to Martin. Why are APCs for ASSD still wavered, although it's already 10 years old? Exactly. It has a very high impact factor. Yeah, this is simply because fortunately, after 18 years of OMEX's publishing, we can admit that at least in Earth and Environment Sciences, the funding is good enough so that most of the people have chances to acquire the article processing charges for OMEX's journal publications. Whereas for ASSD, the specific part is that it's not a topical journal. There we focus on data publication. We do not look for full articles where the interpretation of the data is going on. We want to see only the descriptions and review on the data set. And we thought so far, since it started as a Copernicus outreach activity, that funders will not yet value such a paper in a way that they will give APCs for it. But this might change at the moment. Yeah, it's still an outreach activity. So therefore, although it has a high impact factor that is well established, we still waive APCs. Okay, good answer. There aren't any more questions at this stage and we have about three minutes left of the webinar. So I actually might finish it there unless there's any further comments from any of the panelists that you want to make. Yeah, okay, good. Sorry, Alberto, what was that? Yeah, let me say that I'm, again, I was very excited by this experience and I invite you, Claude, to organize other webinars on relevant issues. And I would like to thank very much the participants.