AGU Advances Promotes the Spread of Accessible Science

Abstract:

In 2019, AGU launched a new premier open-access journal, AGU Advances, to publish the most important work in the fields of Earth, space, and planetary science. A major goal of the journal is to make the contents of each of its papers accessible to people from outside the field and to help convey this material to the broadest audience possible. Because the journal aims to publish fewer than 150 papers per year, we have the capacity to dedicate substantial effort to the summary and communication of each. Some of the efforts piloted for all AGU Advances articles include: compulsory plain-language summaries, highlights in Eos written by editors, inclusion in a jargon-free digest released with each issue (emailed and online), and further promotion with either press releases or social media posts. With more than six months of articles now published, we can present both anecdotal evidence and Altmetric scores that suggest that these efforts do increase the attention that each article gets and also boost the conversation about the results within the scientific and extended communities.