Washington, DC and Santa Clara, CA—September 21, 2017—The American Geophysical Union (AGU) and Atypon announced today a joint initiative to develop Earth and Space Science Open Archive (ESSOAr), a community server for the open dissemination of Earth and space science preprints and rich conference presentations. Development of the server, community engagement, and policies and practices will be a community effort guided by an international advisory board that will include representatives from societies across the Earth and space sciences. Its initial development will be supported by Wiley, AGU’s publishing partner.
Preprint servers allow researchers to receive peer feedback that improves the final published output, and facilitates faster, open dissemination of research. Research outputs posted on preprint servers are also fully citable via digital object identifier (DOI) and freely accessible.
Atypon is building the new open access Earth and space science preprint server on top of its online publishing platform, Literatum, which will provide stability and regular feature enhancements, as well as content format interoperability.
ESSOAr will extend the traditional role of archiving manuscripts by also allowing researchers the option to preserve and to make citable presentations, posters, and related multimedia content from scientific conferences. More than 50,000 posters are presented across Earth and space science conferences, including about 17,000 at the AGU Fall Meeting. These are rich presentations of original research that can add to the understanding of the scientific process, but unless a follow-up article is published on the topic, that science is no longer discoverable. Their preservation will greatly increase scientific transparency.
“AGU has long been an advocate for open science and proper attribution of research, in collaboration with other organizations in the Earth and space science community,” said Chris McEntee, AGU Executive Director and CEO. “The introduction of a preprint server for the Earth and space sciences builds on our previous efforts and public statements in open science, which include the expansion of AGU’s open access journals and development of data management programs, and advances this work even further.”
“Our interest and involvement in the ESSOAr initiative reflects our corporate commitment to open science”, said Georgios Papadopoulos, Atypon’s founder and CEO. “Offering preprint capabilities to support researchers’ editorial needs is a natural extension of our core platform.”
An advisory board will help guide ESSOAr, and currently includes participation from the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, Earth Science Information Partners, European Geosciences Union, Geochemical Society, Geological Society of America (GSA), Japan Geoscience Union (JpGU), and Society of Exploration Geophysicists. “GSA is pleased to participate in this advisory group to explore all the options for preprint publications,” said Vicki McConnell, Executive Director, GSA.
“We appreciate the opportunity to learn about and guide a larger effort around developing preprint options for our community,” added Kiyoshi Suyehiro, International Program Coordinator, JpGU.
Participation on the board does not constitute endorsement by the societies, though it is anticipated that each organization, through its own governance process, will endorse the effort. AGU hopes that other Earth and space science societies and scholarly publishers will join this effort.
ESSOAr (www.essoar.org) will begin accepting content in 2018.
About AGU
The American Geophysical Union is dedicated to advancing the Earth and space sciences for the benefit of humanity through its scholarly publications, conferences, and outreach programs. AGU is a not-for-profit, professional, scientific organization representing nearly 60,000 members in 139 countries. Join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and AGU’s other social media channels.
About Atypon
Atypon was founded in 1996 with headquarters in Santa Clara, CA, and offices worldwide. The company’s publishing platform, Literatum, provides easy-to-use tools and automated technologies that free publishers to focus on content—not technology—giving them as much control of the presentation, marketing, and sale of their online publications as they choose, as well as full support for any content type. Continual investment in innovation and development talent has helped create world-class software that allows publishers to quickly and cost-effectively build and revise content sites with their branding front and center, analyze and respond to usage patterns, manage user access, enhance content discovery and support marketing and digital commerce.