Being a Good Peer Reviewer

Every year, the Society for Scholarly Publishing celebrates Peer Review Week, sometime in September.

 They often has several posts about peer reviewing at their blog, The Scholarly Kitchen. One of the posts that week was “How to Be a Good Peer Reviewer” by Jasmine Wallace, the Peer Review Manager at the American Society for Microbiology. Please read it.

Some highlights from the advice that she gives:

• Mind the time: please do not keep your research peers waiting. Pay attention to the deadline for submitting your report and make time to get it done by that date. If you foresee a delay, then either don’t accept the invitation to request or ask for an extension.
• Be intentional: strive to add value to what is presented in the manuscript, rather than simply criticizing it. Go into it with the idea of making the research community stronger by helping the authors publish a good study.
• Read the guidelines and scope: you should not treat all reviewing assignments the same. Not only is each journal different, but different paper types have different criteria for acceptance. For JGR Space Physics, our reviewing guidelines are here with more information here, plus a description of paper types is here.
• Educate and grow your community: peer reviewing for a journal is a service to your research community, so go into this with the mindset that it is not just about you, the authors, and the editor, but rather you are improving the quality of research in your community.
• Say No: is it fine to say no to a reviewing request. Well, not all the time, but if you are not willing and able to get the review done on time, then it is better to say no and suggest colleagues who might have interest and availability.
• Be Bold and Constructive: be bold in that you should not be intimidated to offer criticism of a senior colleague’s work, yet be constructive in that you should be specific and detailed in how to improve the work to make it publishable.
• Get Credit: if you haven’t already, please sign up for ORCID so that there is a public record of your reviewing service to the community.

For the most part, reviewers for JGR Space Physics adhere to these good-reviewer guidelines. I am fortunate to get to work with so many thoughtful, thorough, and considerate researchers. Thank you for being such a great community.

 

Letters and Commentaries

I recently reread Tamas Gombosi’s inaugural address to the space physics community when he became Senior Editor (the old term for Editor in Chief) of JGR Space Physics in 1992. He lays out several new initiatives that he wanted to or did implement with the journal during his term.

One of the things that he mentions are Letters to the Editor. He can correct me if I am wrong but I could only find three examples of “guest editorials” in JGR Space Physics during his tenure. The first was by George Withbroe in December 1992, just two months after Gombosi announced the new policy, offering praise for Gombosi’s Editorial in November on JGR publishing too many papers. I’ll write a separate post on that pair of editorials in the near future.

The second was by Philip Abelson in March 1993, which I wrote about a couple months ago, recounting the early history of JGR, from its inception as Terrestrial Magnetism and eventual adoption by AGU as its flagship journal. The third was really by Gombosi, in January 1995, in which he reprinted L. Bauer’s initial editorial in the first issue of the first volume of Terrestrial Magnetism. This was done in honor of the 100^th volume of JGR, published that year. Appropriately, the citation for this reprinting lists Bauer as the author, not Gombosi, so I’ll count it as a “guest editorial.”

It appears that other editorial teams after him did not continue this practice. I cannot find a guest editorial appearing any time after the Bauer reprinting. Actually, we won’t have “letters to the editor” and “guest editorials” anytime soon, either. It’s not because this is a bad idea; quite the opposite! It’s because AGU has formalized this type of contribution as its own paper type, the Commentary. The official description is here (scroll down to Paper Types and click on Commentaries), but I will reprint it because this is just a short paragraph:

Commentaries provide readers with context on a recent publication or meeting, a notable anniversary or event, an update on a paper of importance, or special collection in an AGU or other journal. Commentaries are submitted to a specific journal but the audience is the broad Earth and space science community. The maximum length is up to six publication units and up to two tables or figures. Read our author guidelines on commentaries.

The full details are in the guidelines PDF at the link above. While Commentaries are short (capped at 6 Pub Units), they are less of a letter or editorial and moreso a perspectives article, making a pitch to the scientists in the field. They should inspire us towards some action or research focus, with just a bit of background detail. In fact, making it even more paper-like, AGU requires a short Abstract and highly encourages a Plain Language Summary, so that its message can be understood not only by the readership of the specific journal to which it is submitted (like JGR Space Physics) but also by the broader Earth and space science research community. AGU even posts them all together in a special all-journal collection, in addition to being on the specific journal website.

Note that submitting a Commentary requires approval from the journal’s Editorial Board. You do this by sending an email with a brief description of your article concept (a paragraph or two is enough). For JGR Space Physics, any editor can approve the submission of a Commentary, but sending this inquiry email to jgrspacephysics@agu.org will ensure that gets to all of us. Note that approval to submit does not guarantee publication; these articles are sent out for review. The acceptance criteria are different than a Research Article paper type, because they do not have to contain a significant new advancement of knowledge but rather they need to contain something significant for the community to know. So, sometimes, Commentaries are declined publication, even though they were invited to be submitted.

This is the modern “letter to the editor,” and I think that most AGU journals (except GRL and Reviews of Geophysics) are now open to the submission and publication of Commentaries. If you are interested and feel compelled to do so, then please think about sending us an inquiry pitch for a Commentary idea.

Space Weather to be Open Access

Yes, as the incoming EiC of Space Weather, Noe Lugaz, noted in a response to yesterday’s post, there is more news about that journal – as of January 2020, it will be a fully Open Access journal.

            Right now, Space Weather has Hybrid Open Access, with each author deciding whether to make their paper Open Access or not. According to the Pub Fee chart, the author could choose to pay nothing (except perhaps excess length charges) and then readers must have a subscription or pay a fee to see the full article during the first 24 months after publication. The other option is that they pay a fee ($3500 for most articles) and make it available to all readers immediately upon publication. Under the new plan, all authors would have to pay a $2500 fee to publish and all articles would be open to all readers immediately.

My quick glance through some of the recent issues of Space Weather reveal that less than half of the authors choose Open Access. I hope, however, that this change will not result in a lower submission rate to this journal. Space Weather is a very nice complement to JGR Space Physics, with the latter focusing on the science of the space environment and the former focusing on forecasting the state of the space environment and the impact of geomagnetic activity on humanity and our technological assets. The two journals serve distinct yet neighboring communities.

More about AGU’s Open Access policies can be found here and the full Author Resources page is here.

Data Policy Update

Because we all love talking about AGU’s data policy, you should know that when you go to the JGR Space Physics GEMS manuscript submission site, in fact the GEMS site for any AGU journal, you will see this notice above the login fields:

I don’t actually know how long it has been there. I go to this login page a lot but often fail to spend any time on it, quickly zipping to the login fields and moving on to my editorial tasks. I posted last summer about this change that “data available from authors” is not allowed, with a list of available generic data repositories that will mint a digital object identifier for your data files. I keep getting comments and some pushback from the community about this, and now I just noticed and carefully read this “Important” statement on the GEMS login page! So it is a convenient time to have a blog post about it.

This has been slowly changing throughout my time as EiC. When I had just started, AGU was in the process of fully implementing its stated data policy. I then had a couple of other posts in 2014 about how the editorial board for JGR Space Physics this policy, and then another in 2015 on supporting information. That one actually stated that it was okay to have the digital values stored as supporting information along with the paper but this is no longer allowed. Well, please upload it as supporting information for review purposes, with a note to the editor that this is what you are doing, but upon acceptance, upload those files to a DOI-minting data repository for permanent archiving.

Authors: please plan accordingly with your digital data, both observational and numerical. AGU wants all of the numbers behind the figures available to reviewers and readers. Please include data sets as supporting info during submission but have a statement about the repository to which it will be uploaded in the Acknowledgments section, and include all weblinks to existing data repositories.

Reviewers: please check data availability for the manuscripts that you review. This should now be part of your checklist. AGU HQ staff and the editor should also be checking this, but you are critical to this process too.

Note that this supersedes the posted Data Policy at the AGU Author Resources pages, which still describe the policy enacted in 2014. I hope that this webpage is updated soon.

More about FAIR data policies can be found at the COPDESS website.

 

Now There’s a GEMS-to-ESSOAr Link

AGU is implementing a feature in GEMS for authors to seamlessly submit their manuscript to ESSOAr, the Earth and Space Science Open Archive. In case you haven’t heard about ESSOAr, it is a preprint server specifically for our field. It is developed by Atypon with AGU being the lead society behind its creation, and another dozen or so societies on the ESSOAr advisory board participating in its design and implementation (including EGU). My initial blog post about ESSOAr gives some details about this preprint server, and I have written a couple other posts about preprint servers in general.

I am told that this new transfer from GEMS to ESSOAr would occur right after the quality control check by AGU staff. As it is sent to me for editor assignment, the author will get an email asking if they want a PDF of the manuscript to be uploaded for public availability to ESSOAr. If they agree, it would then be forwarded to the ESSOAr editorial board for approval before being posted. A serious submission to JGR Space Physics should not be denied from ESSOAr.

I am excited about this and I agreed to let JGR Space Physics be one of the first journals to pilot this option. It goes live next Monday (June 17).

I hope that you like this new feature and I hope that you confirm simultaneous submission to the ESSOAr preprint server. Posting to a preprint server is not considered dual publication by AGU and overlap from manuscripts at such servers is ignored in the cross-check report. The historical average is that ~70% of manuscripts submitted to JGR Space Physics eventually being accepted, simultaneous release at ESSOAr will make your study available to readers a few months sooner than the current editorial-publication timeline.

Also regarding ESSOAr, after you log in with your ORCID account info (via the button in the upper right of the page):

you can conduct searches. After you run a search, you can then save it by clicking the “search-plus” icon in the upper left:

You can then set the frequency of receiving new content alerts from ESSOAr with these search terms. Like getting an email from Wiley with the JGR Space Physics table of contents (they send out three levels of TOC alerts: accepted, early view, and issue info), you can also get content alerts for new manuscripts uploaded to ESSOAr. I hope that you take advantage of this feature and the earlier availability of manuscripts submitted to JGR Space Physics.