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Climate Change and Publishing—How Publishers Can Make an Impact
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Climate Change and Publishing—How Publishers Can Make an Impact
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Segment:0 .
Hello, everybody.
Thank you and welcome to today's webinar, climate change and publishing how publishers can make an impact. My name is Mia Ricci. I'm a member of the education committee and the director of publication operations at the Au. Before we start, I want to thank our 2023 education sponsors, silverchair, 67, bricks, Taylor Francis F1000 and moresca. We are grateful for your support.
So a few housekeeping items. Attendee microphones have been muted automatically, so please use the Q&A panel to answer your questions for the panelists. You can also use the chat feature to communicate with other participants or organizers. We have three panelists today, so we'll have a limited Q&A time. So I encourage all of you to put your questions and comments in the Q&A or the chat as you watch them present so the panelists can answer them there as well.
Closed captions have been enabled and you can view captions by selecting the More option on your screen and choosing show captions. This one hour session will be recorded and will be available to view in a few days. A quick note on the code of conduct and today's meeting. We are committed to diversity, equity and providing an inclusive meeting environment. Fostering open dialogue, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct.
We ask that all participants, whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner. And now I'm happy to introduce you to my co-moderator, Clark Holdsworth, education committee member and senior manager of communication and partnerships from Acton. Clark, over to you. Yeah Thank you, Mia.
Appreciate it. So I'm going to remind everyone of what our webinar is. Some of you may have signed up for it quite a while ago, so we'll cover the topic and then get into our three speakers that we have for today. So again, the topic is climate change and publishing how publishers can make an impact. There's two key points of view that we're going to be focusing on today.
What challenges will climate change Pose for the industry and what can scholarly publishers as science disseminators do to help advance climate change research? So as publishers, we know that there's a credibility and resources to play a key role in expediting the trajectory of climate change research globally by placing this important work front and center for decision makers at both the international and the regional levels.
They also have the opportunity to lead by example via their own solutions to the problems that climate change may Pose directly to the industry. And so our speakers today that we have are going to address the varied avenues by which scholarly publishers can engage with their audiences on climate change research. And so this is the I'm going to introduce all the speakers now so that we know who is on the panel.
Before we get to the Q&A. The first speaker that we'll have is Alyssa Findlay, senior editor, nature climate change, and Alyssa holds a PhD in oceanography from the University of Delaware. Importantly, her research area is consistent with the topic of research dissemination that we'll discuss today. It ranges from marine and Lake biogeochemistry to carbon cycling in Arctic marine sediments and integrated Chemical microbiological and modeling approaches.
Since joining nature climate change in 2019, she's handled manuscripts broadly in the area of climate change impacts vulnerability and adaptation. Our second speaker will be Chris kalinauskas, a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for research in environmental sciences and an associate professor in the Department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Additionally, Chris is the editor of geophysical research letters. Chris holds a doctorate from the University of Maryland, College park, an atmospheric and oceanic sciences. Chris also recently served on the scientific steering committee of the Uc Climate variability and predictability program. And then our third and final speaker will be Graham brumfield, head of journals frontiers.
Graham joined frontiers in 2022 to lead the sustainability, biosciences and programs. He contributes to frontiers titles that sit within the sustainability portfolio. And importantly, he's been working with researchers in this field to support their publishing activities and critical to this webinar. His work aims to provide tools and resources that help drive the impact and visibility of research in these fields.
So I think you're going to learn a little bit more about each speaker as they go through some of their experiences. So I'll leave it to them to elaborate and that can take us right into our first speaker. Alyssa Alyssa, if you want to join. All right. So you should see my slides now.
Yes um, can I just have confirmation that it worked? OK Yeah. So thank you, Clark, for the introduction. I'm happy. I'm very happy to be here today to talk about what journals can do in supporting climate change research coming from the perspective of nature, climate change. And so I can mostly skip this slide. Clark has already said most of this, but the one point I do want to emphasize is that my role at nature, climate change, is a full time job, which means that I am no longer actively engaged in research.
So I still engage with the research community, but I'm not doing my own work. So I'm a full time editor. And so that's the perspective that I'm bringing here for this work on nature, climate change. So enough about me. Just a quick background about nature, climate change. So it's part of the nature portfolio and we focus topically on the science of contemporary climate change, its impacts, implications for the economy, policy and society.
So paleoclimate work is not generally something that would be considered within the scope of the journal unless it's really quite heavily related to current climate change. We're a highly selective journal, which means that we're run by a team of full time professional editors like myself, and we sort of act as a proxy for our readership. And so a lot of papers are rejected without review because of our criteria of novelty and that broader interest.
So we cover, like I said, the theme of climate change rather than any particular discipline, making our coverage quite interdisciplinary. The first official volume was published in 2012 and we were the first thematic rather than discipline specific journal in the nature portfolio. We have 12 issues per year and our audience is very broad and includes researchers and in all of the disciplines that that touch on climate change as well as policy makers and people in industry.
And then in addition to original primary research. So science, we do publish other format types and I'll talk a bit more about those later. For example, opinion comment, content reviews and these sorts of things. So like I said, and like it's in the journal nature, climate change is our scope. And so one of the ways that we try to help support research, climate change research is to focus on specific topics.
And so this might be organizing a collection where there's a lot of work been going on to try to help kind of organize some of what's been going on or do a focus issue on some topic that's particularly timely, particularly relevant, potentially also connected to a particular event. And so here are some examples that we've done in the past. So we had a collection ahead of cop26 trying to support the key aims of that conference, and that was archived content from our journal as well as a few other sister journals to try to really put the spotlight on relevant research that had been done to support the discussions going on at cop.
We also had a focus issue a few years ago on forest carbon. This is when there were a lot of really key papers that key research happening about the ability of forests to take up carbon and that using that as a mitigation strategy. So we did a focus issue to try to push particular topics and continue the conversation around that. And currently we've got a collection going on as well as a call for papers around progress towards sustainable development goals, which includes climate action.
So this is just a few different examples of how we try to support within, you know, the broad theme of climate change to support different research areas at a particular time. So because we're a thematic journal rather than discipline specific, our readership is interdisciplinary by nature. And this also means that we've been historically a home and are continued to be a home for work that might not fit into a field specific journal.
So this can be collaborations between social and natural scientists, which is becoming more and more important within the climate change space in the mitigation side is really important moving forward, but it can also be collaborations between natural scientists, between biologists and physicists, particularly as climate change is an environmental issue and the effects are felt so broadly. Bringing people together from different fields is critical to further to further work here.
And so I wanted to just discuss a few things that we've learned from our perspective about how to support these sorts of interdisciplinary papers. But before I do that, the one caveat is that not all work needs to be interdisciplinary to be impactful. We publish interdisciplinary work, but we also publish discipline specific work. So just that one caveat.
So one of the main things that editors can do to support the publication of interdisciplinary work, particularly in climate change, is to really be aware of issues and challenges within different fields as well as the language each field uses. And so we sort of need to act a bit as a translator between the reviewers. And then with reviewers and authors to help them understand what does need to be done.
What are the, um, what are, what are the reviewers asking? Basically, what are the aspects that need to be revised. It's also our responsibility to ensure that reviewers can comment on all aspects of a study. And this means, you know, if a paper is particularly interdisciplinary, maybe we need to 4 or 5 reviewers to make sure that each aspect of that paper is evaluated and that it's on solid ground. And then when particularly when working with so many reviewers, is making sure that we have good communications with authors and reviewers.
And so reviewers might comment on different aspects of a study and they're providing their perspective. But we really want to weigh the expertise of different reviewers when communicating to authors what changes might be necessary to the study and what are the critical areas. Because what can happen is, you know, a reviewer comments on a study, those comments are sort of in contrast to what another reviewer has said, and then the authors don't know how to proceed.
And then finally sort of post publication is that we can and do commission related content to help explain a particular study or explain relevance to a broader readership. So I want to get a little bit more into our content types because this is one of the ways that we do try to support both climate change research and dissemination of climate change research. So beyond sort of the standard research and review articles, we offer other format types, including opinion content, which helps to set a research agenda or bring attention to a particular important issue either within the field or sort of trying to translate a particular issue to policy.
We also offer analysis, and this is a study where the analysis itself is useful and novel rather than the results per se. And then excitingly, in the past few years, we've introduced policy briefs and these are really targeted at policy makers, and they're meant to make the results of a study that we've published more accessible to policymakers. And so here are just some examples of those. So this first one is just a perspective that evaluated the major climate change scenario framework used by the IPCC.
And a lot of modelers sort of evaluating where it's been and where it should go. The second one is an example of an analysis that just looked at whether deforestation alerts work or don't work to hinder illegal deforestation in the tropics. And then finally, an example of a policy brief that was published again on a paper that we published. And this one was about renewable, renewable energy certificates.
And then just to get a little bit more in depth from the policy brief, because this is a really important format, this is what they look like, they're very short. So most of the information is on the first page, a very brief summary of what the problem is for policy, what the study did and what the findings are. And the second page is a figure and maybe some further reading. So it's really meant to be the key information is front and center in one page, so policymakers don't need to read a whole paper to get the key, the key findings that are relevant for their work.
Um, and so finally, just a few other initiatives that the journal offers generally to support research and open research and transparency in research is providing a full text of the PDF version that can be shared without getting a paywall supporting posting preprints before review. Having authors link their ORCID so that you can more easily identify who the authors are and then ensuring that all papers have a data encoded availability statement and encouraging data where possible to be openly accessible.
So in addition to supporting research, we also do try to support science communication and the communication of the work that we publish. So sort of around and following publication, we try to make sure that the articles are written accessibly. So trying to limit use of jargon or very technical terms in the main body of the work we write, press releases, we commission on Publish related content, whether that's a comment or sort of a news infused type article offering a different perspective on a published piece of work.
So here's just an example of that. Here's a paper that we published, a research paper, and then it was a bit, a bit nuanced, this particular piece that we asked them, we publish this news and views that sort of unpacked some of the nuance and the pros and cons of what the authors had done there. We also offer sort of these blog type community pages where editors and authors can post stories behind the paper or unpack their paper for a different audience.
We also have across the company Twitter and WeChat channels, as well as regional news sites that offer research news in local languages. And this is just a screenshot from nature Africa, which has news articles in French. And so following from that, one of the key things is that we do try to support a diversity of perspectives in climate change research and try to reach a broad audience with the dissemination of the results.
Climate change impacts are global, but they do disproportionately impact communities in the global south, as well as historically marginalized communities. And we at nature, climate change really believe that we have a responsibility to make sure that their voices are part of the global conversation around climate change, science impacts and policy, even if.
They're not, you know, actively doing research. So one of the ways that we try to support the diversity of perspectives is by making sure our reviewers represent a diverse pool of researchers and scientists by inviting content to highlight or to elevate a particular perspective or voice by doing targeted outreach, visiting institutions in particular areas, or speaking with researchers in particular areas by offering alternative content types.
And I'll show a few examples of those later. And this is particularly key for those people who might not be engaged in scientific research but whose perspectives are important in the global climate change conversation. And then finally, we do offer alternative publishing options. As I mentioned, climate change is highly selective, but not all. Just because we've rejected a paper doesn't mean the study is not important.
And so making sure that we try to find a good home for those papers as well within our journal portfolio. So one of the content types that we use to try to highlight additional voices would be features. So this first one is just an example of a photo feature that I'd organized a few years ago speaking with photographers who were working on environmental issues and trying to capture the kind of change impacts in their countries.
And we highlighted their photos in this particular piece, as well as a viewpoint that we recently published focusing on researchers in the African continent and what they thought were the key. The key topics in their areas moving forward. So focusing on a regional perspective. And then something else that we do is question and answer type content. And so here's an example of a Q&A that we did as part of that forest focus talking about indigenous forest management.
So talking with indigenous practitioners, indigenous peoples and their perspectives on forest management, again, these are not people who would be publishing scientific content but have something valuable to offer to the climate change conversation. And then more recently we had a question and answer session with the outgoing IPCC chair.
So finally, I have some thoughts about what publishers can do to support journals to help support climate change research and researchers. And one of the key points is that press support is very helpful. So climate change is a very contentious topic, and editors and researchers can get hate mail comments on social media, as well as blogs and media coverage.
And many of you may have seen there was a recent blog posting about climate change, a climate change paper that was published in Nature. And it was very important that the editor of nature had that press support to really know how to engage and when to engage and how to engage with these sorts of comments is very important. So that's, I think, the key point. And then some other things that initiatives that we have at nature is nature conferences that would focus on a particular topic, as well as master classes that are meant to support writing researchers and writing research articles and communicating the results.
So with that, I will Thank you for your time and listening. And I guess we'll take questions in the chat and later as well. All right. Thank you very much, Alice. Appreciate it. I have some questions already, but of course, I'll be very patient with those. For the attendees, if you do have questions, it would be great if you, as each speaker goes through, feel free to throw them into the Q&A function at this time.
That way we can sort of plan out and make sure that we get all the questions addressed. So, Chris, you're all set to take it away now. Thanks, Clark. Just going to share my screen. Slides coming through. OK? yes, those look good.
Great well, Thank you for the introduction earlier. As Clark said, I'm Chris Karnofsky and I'm at the University of Colorado, Boulder. There's a beautiful view of our campus from above there. But I yeah, I find myself at the intersection of these two constructs that are in the webinar title, climate change and publishing. Slight, slightly in contrast to Dr. Finley, I'm an editor as well, but I'm an editor for a society journal, namely a journal that's run by the American Geophysical union and published by Wiley.
So it's more of a volunteer basis. And I'm a practicing scientist still, so I study climate change in various ways and have for most of my career. All of my degrees come from atmospheric and oceanic sciences, and all the papers I've published have something to do with climate variability and change. Um, I lead an active research group that consists of postdocs, PhD students, master's students and even undergrads.
And then as a professor, of course, I go into the classroom to a few times a week to try to help the next generation of adults, industry leaders, voters try to understand the science of climate change. So, um, yeah, in my recent, in recent years, I think sort of in my capacity as a journal editor and as an individual scientist, I've expended some energy trying to support open access and open science.
And so actually most of my remarks this morning will be about open science and sort of how important that is for, um, sort of as a way that scholarly, the scholarly publishing industry can help solve the climate crisis. So here's all of my key points and I'm going to go through most of these just like with a slide to sort of illustrate my point. But my first point, since I'm a scientist and a professor, I have to show you a graph or I wouldn't be much of a professor.
So, you know, we're conducting a massive, uncontrolled, uncontrolled experiment with Earth's climate right now. And this is a little graph that I made from existing data that represents the carbon dioxide concentration in the global atmosphere, and it shows it over almost the last million years and it goes up and down over time. That is due to the glacial interglacial cycles and then added on to that long term record that goes back 800,000 years is the monolo CO2 record, which is a direct measurement of CO2 in a pristine environment.
And it shows this sort of obvious departure from the normal fluctuations in it. I've marked a few different years on there. 1882 would be sort of marked here just as a rough indicator of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when I was born. So you can do the math. And then when I became a dad, so you can sort of tell these increments of time are shorter, which means things are really accelerating rapidly.
Looking forward to where we're going, not looking forward to it, but looking ahead. Um, there's a number of possible Futures and what we do now will ultimately determine where we end up in the year 2100. And funny enough, the acronyms for these different scenarios are actually SSP, which is not has nothing to do with the Society of scholarly publishers, but perhaps it's kind of a nice coincidence anyways.
Um, and so we could end up just a tiny bit above where we are, and that's a situation where we meet low challenges to mitigation, meaning reducing our emissions and adaptation. And frankly, that that ship has almost sailed, as you can tell. We're almost to that point now. And then the future perfectly within the realm of possibility, all depending on what we do as a global society, could put us at CO2 levels that are several times higher than what it is now, potentially over 1,000 parts per million where we're at like 400 rides now.
So this is a really scary situation to be in. And we're right at the cusp of going and knowing over the next several decades where we're going to end up. And Lisa talked about the sustainable development goals, which have a lot to do with trying to reduce emissions. And as you can see, ever since we started measuring. So if we just Zoom in on the very end of the graph here, just the last several decades, going back to about 1960, you can see the carbon dioxide curve.
Going up rather relentlessly, despite the fact that in the 70s we climate, scientists started using pretty sophisticated methods to make predictions about global warming, most of which have turned out to be right so far. And the Paris Climate Agreement went into force in 2016. And you can see that the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere didn't even flinch. So this is sort of what we're faced with and what I, as a scientist am working on.
You probably have been following the news if you're on this webinar, so you're probably aware that last, last, last semester, last month was, you know, a record shattering global temperature by a record shattering amount. So these are all of the September temperature anomalies going back in time. And then you can see this last month's is just outrageously higher than others.
And there's a lot of interesting scientific things going into that. It's not all global warming. It's a lot of this is global warming, but there's some natural fluctuations on top of it that are interesting as well. But that's definitely on brand with the trend that we're seeing. So we are again conducting a massive uncontrolled experiment with Earth's climate right now.
And as scientists and publishers and scientists who publish, we need to do what we can to help solve this problem. And I have become convinced that we can't do that if our collective and rapidly evolving knowledge is hidden behind paywalls or if we have to email strangers to get the data. So I refer to this piece written by the former editor in chief of oceans, Peter brewer, who was a Chemical who is a Chemical oceanographer, worked at mbari.
And this is a really nice piece. And he talks about a situation in 2016 when he was supposed to be writing this big synthesis of what we know about a certain problem related to all this and ultimately couldn't get the raw data from all the know, from the various studies that he's trying to, you know, review and synthesize. And I love this quote at the end, you know.
So he emails the people who write the papers and they all say, you know, data available upon request. I'm sure at the end of the paper. And then not once did I receive a sure. I'm happy to do that. It was delay, obfuscation, please, of being busy and so on. Um, you know, he's talking about Excel spreadsheets with a few columns of data.
It's not hard to share if you can find it, but it wasn't available or easy to find. So the ugly truth is that in some cases, he was reduced to blowing up figures on the copier and drawing pencil lines across the image in order to figure out what the data points, what numbers those data points had so he could compile them with other data. So that's a problem. We need to be sharing our data.
And as I'll show you in my next point actually, that journals and funding. Funding agencies are doing something about that. And we need to keep doing that. Um, but more broadly, the entire climate research enterprise depends critically on open science. And I'm speaking as a climate researcher, but I'm sure this is true of other fields as well. But I know it's especially true in climate, atmospheric science, oceanography, all of the sort of Earth Sciences that touch on climate change.
And actually, I've, you know, once in a while I become aware of the situation in other fields. And I have to say it's actually a pretty great time to be a climate scientist. It is amazing how much you can do sitting at a computer in terms of acquiring data, analyzing data, doing some really cool stuff, just as a, you know, a little depiction of what I'm talking about. We have satellites orbiting the Earth that are taking amazing measurements of things like sea level rise, temperature in the atmosphere, temperature at the surface, ice mass on Greenland, all of these things that are relevant to climate.
We've got these satellites orbiting the Earth and they're just giving the data right back down to data centers on Earth. And in almost every case, unless it's something classified by the military, which probably not studying climate change anyway, you and I can just go online and click buttons and download it. You have to sort of have some experience in handling large data files and working with it.
But, you know, in principle this is accessible to everybody. Here's another example. This is this is from today. This is a map that shows every one of these little points is a location where one of these guys are one of these Argo profilers or Argo floats, they're called. And what these things do is Bob up and down in the ocean, Bob up and down by like a couple of kilometers. And they measure temperature and salinity of the seawater as they go up and down.
And so that map is just remarkable to me that all of those places are a place where we have one of these. Right now. There are almost 4,000 of these Argo floats out there. And you can go online, click a button and have the data all to do whatever you want with it freely, quickly, publicly. And this is the kind of norm in our field, which is just wonderful.
We can do a lot of work with what we have available, that the taxpayers are putting a lot of money up to produce. Of course, one of the issues that I'm also talking about is what do the taxpayers get back? How, you know, they're not the ones typically doing that work and discovering things about science. It's the scientists doing that. And then we're publishing our papers.
And then there's a bit of an issue about whether or not the public has access to those papers. So that's a huge problem that I'll talk about in just a second here. But I'm just showing you screen grabs here from these various websites that I'm kind of alluding to, like noaa, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Here's a website where you can go and just click and download without registering or doing anything.
You know, these big gridded climate data sets that you can analyze for their own sake or cross analyze with something societally relevant or ecologically relevant or whatever you want to do. Nasa has very similar data repositories where you can, in principle, any measurement that Nasa makes ultimately becomes part of the Open Data record. So it's great.
On top of measurements, we also have climate models. So Dr. Finley also referred to global climate models, or she referred to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, IPCC reports and how important those are. And those are really Fed by climate, largely Fed. I would say many chapters in the IPCC reports are Fed their information by the results of global climate model experiments. And again, all of those climate model experiments, if they go into the IPCC report, all of the output gets archived into these data sets or into these sort of data servers that you can go online.
For this one, you have to register, but it's free. You just basically are giving your email address. Then you log in and you can download any model you want, any output you want, any experiment past or future, and, you know, study the climate system. However, you wish. And it's just amazing. Um, OK. And so that's great for these large sort of global data sets that would benefit everybody.
Of course, that's not what that piece by Peter Brewer was really referring to. He's probably talking about Chemical measurements that were made in one piece lab, and it's on a spreadsheet that's saved on their old laptop, you know, and so these open data policies by journals such as Au or the Public Library of science, all the journals, they all say very similar things that if you submit at some point in the process of submitting and publishing a paper with them, you've got to provide at least enough data that makes the science reproducible, because that's what good science really is, is if it's reproducible, if your experiment is reproducible, it's robust science.
And so we just want to make sure that we can do that. Whether people are really going and doing it is another question. But in principle, the data needs to be available to double check things and to use it for other purposes that you can't even predict as a scientist when you're doing your science. So there's these things that say this. I can tell you as an editor who's been an editor for Jay for a couple different journals for the past decade plus, enforcement can be complicated.
You know, we no longer accept email. The author. If you want the data, you know, you actually have to post it somewhere publicly. But it's hard to have the human resources to check that every file that's posted is actually providing enough data and whatnot. But this is a really great step in the right direction. And a lot of funding agencies are actually requiring it as well, not just the journals.
So this is great. And it's just an example from a recent paper that I published in GRL that was about hurricanes in the North Atlantic and how climate change, climate change will affect it. And we used a repository called zenodo where you can for free upload, you know, relatively large data set documented a little bit enough so that a stranger can download it and use it is a pretty painless process.
Actually we did. We did. We post all of the output from, you know, the entire climate model experiment. No, that would be very burdensome. And just an enormous volume of data. But we did post enough of the data that someone can reproduce our results in that paper. And then really one of my final points here is that for some reason, folks in my field have been relatively slow to embrace open access.
We're really big on open data. For the most part, it's open access that physical climate scientists seem to be a little slower to embrace. I don't know why a few ideas to throw out there is that, you know, publishing, there's a whole, you know, business model and a change in business model. When a journal goes open access, it's shifting the burden of the cost around.
And for example, when the journal that I'm an editor for right now, when we went open access, the cost went from just a bargain of $500 a paper where if you publish it in that way, people out in the public can't just immediately go download that paper and read it for free. You've got to be at a University with a, you know, a subscription to that journal or pay as a one time payment for that one paper.
When we went open access, the cost to the author increased to 2900 bucks, which still isn't terrible when you think about the scale of federal grants and this is sort of a normal expense within a grant but it varies a lot plus climate's around the same science advances is science magazine's open access cousin and nature's open access fees are, in my view, very high, close to $112,000 to publish open access in nature.
And so that this can be a real problem. If you don't have big external grants to publish your papers, then these costs, even $2,900 can be prohibitive. Um, you know, there's other dynamics within academia beyond just the economics. You know, we well, it's still economics. We're in a prestige economy and in academia. So are we still too concerned with the prestige and influence of that?
Traditionally comes with certain journals that are traditionally non. Are we academics? You know, like me. Just too busy to take this up right now. Part of that is probably true. And do we not really even notice the problem since, you know, sitting here in my office at the University of Colorado, I can, you know, fire up a web browser and go to probably any journal I'm interested in and read papers without any hassle.
But if I'm at home, I can't. And therefore, a taxpayer who's at home not affiliated with a research institution has that same problem. They can't read the paper that their tax dollars funded, and that's not right. And so I think another dynamic here is that we're just kind of still looking the other way. And not talking about it enough. And when I do, I am part of conversations or hear conversations where the obvious unfairness and frankly, exploitation in the system where, you know, the scientists who are producing the producing the research, writing the proposals, producing the research, we're all volunteering to peer review each other's papers.
And in a lot of cases, we're volunteer editors to run that whole process. And then we hand it over. And that's clearly a system built to profit publishers. So I'm not holding back just today. And then there's some issues within academia in terms of moving the goalpost when you get tenured. And I hear a lot of colleagues, as soon as they get tenure, make proclamations like I'm only going to publish an open access journals.
And it's sort of like, well, good for you. You got where you are by publishing in nature. So I'm not going to say more about that because I don't think it's as much interest to this, this, this crowd. But that's yeah, that's all my slides. And I will stop now and hopefully there's some Q&A in the end.
Thanks very much, Chris. Appreciate it. Again, some more questions from my end, but we'll get there eventually. If you do have questions again, please enter them for us. It's going to help me a ton because I'm going to have to be going through and sort of Fielding these. So please, if you have any questions or comments that arise from this discussion points that you'd like to hear from the speakers on, please do so.
But with that, Graham, I'll let you get started and wrap us up for the third presentation. Thank you very much. Can you just let me know when you can see my slides. So that I'm able to. Presents can you hear me? Yes yep, you can hear you. And yeah, slides just came up.
So you are good to go, Graham. Thank you very much. So, yeah, so Thank you for that. Thank you for inviting me to come and present at this, this, this particular session. As, as you said in the introduction, I'm currently the head of journals for well, actually I've just recently moved from the sustainability portfolio to the within frontiers.
I've been at the company now for, well, nearly two years. And in that time, as part of the time was working on the sustainability portfolio, which is why I think I'm here and hopefully I can give you a bit of an overview of what we're doing here. I just wanted to make mention of Chloe Boyd. She's one of the journal managers we've got here, and she's really primarily managing the bigger sustainability journals in our portfolio.
So just wanted to make mention of her because she's been absolutely instrumental in me helping put together these slides for us. So if I can just move to the next slide and to give you a bit of an overview about what we're going to be talking about, just now and want to take two strands, really wanted to just talk a little bit about the journals we have within our portfolio and what we're doing to really help, help researchers and authors in this field, how we can help them to both get their work published, but also kind of promote it further down the road and give them an opportunity to kind of really have the most impact for what they're working on.
And that's something that we quite heavily invested in. And then want to talk a little bit about some of the things we're doing outside of the core publishing arena, some of the outreach work we're doing and some of the kind of more open science approach, advocacy that we're doing. And then just finally touching very briefly on what we're doing actually as a company to kind of act in a sustainable fashion in business.
Um, so just before I talk about the journals, I wanted to kind of just make mention of the frontiers mission, which obviously we've been around for a few years. We're one of the newer block, so to speak, but we are 100% open access. Digital publishers, so all of our journals are free at the point of access, and we work through an agency model which has been touched on, on, on previously as well.
Um, and our primary method of promoting sustainability as Publisher is really developing content around key issues we work on, on a, on a way of having a number of journals. And within those journals we develop, um, we kind of research topics, but they're kind of like central core areas of research that we think there is going to be a lot of interest and little communities that are building up around this area.
These are the springboard to kind of pulling the research and pulling in authors and researchers around these central themes. And this is what's driving us in what we're doing. And we've got a number of journals already. Um, and when we started to build the sustainability portfolio, we really started working on the sustainable development goals. And there's a number of those and we started to build journals around these areas.
So for example, frontiers in sustainable food systems is our kind of oldest journal in this particular area, managed by Chloe, in fact, and this was set around number two, which is Zealand. And you know, the idea being it's a multidisciplinary journal highlighting issues from farm to fork, and we're using that as a way to really drive and really support researchers in this particular field.
Have a number of other journals as well. We have frontiers in forests and global change, and this was launched around SDG number 15. And again, this is publishing research in the protection policy and management of forests. Um, and we also have a number of other journals as well that I think, you know, you can see on this particular slide here, we've got frontiers in climate, frontiers in sustainability, sustainable cities, and also one in water, which has launched a fairly recently.
And these are focused around 13, eight, nine, 11 and, and so we're using this as a framework so that we're in a position to be able to really offer a platform for researchers, key researchers, publishing, you know, really important valuable work in this area. And this is all part of what we're doing as a publisher in general. And and I think the way that we're trying to support researchers in the sustainability field is the way we will try to support researchers in any field, whether it be oncology or chemistry or any of these areas.
And so we don't have any distinction between the types of journals we're publishing and the types of support we give. You know, we're using the same systems, the same platforms, the same outreach, the same impacts, tools to try to develop these areas of research. So I think this more than anything has really given us a kind of a good opportunity to, you know, work with some of the best editors in the field who are coming on board, really kind of, you know, able to help kind of shape and build the direction that these journals are going in.
And hopefully we are in a certain extent kind of trying to really support authors in this field. And it was mentioned a little bit before as well about how we can support authors following publication. So, um, the way we kind of work in this. So obviously we have the communities that are built around the journals and having. As purely open access means that there is no barrier to access.
So it means that a lot of these journals where we're working in particular areas where there's a lot of research going on in less well funded areas and regions, and put it this way. And they obviously can get access to the research and do obviously have um, Uh, policies in place to kind of help authors from these less well funded areas to kind of help them to overcome some of the apcs that we have there.
Obviously, this is the way that we're working. Um, but we are kind of working out and using our editors and our editors are working with us to really help reach out to academic policy makers figures. And then also, more importantly on this slide, what we're talking about here, you know, the mainstream media and trying to find ways to help disseminate research to both within the academic field but also outside of the academic field.
I just wanted to make a point, just kind of highlight a few things here from this particular slide, because we do have certain amount of success. And again, this is all down to really the quality of research that we're publishing. But we've had some coverage in National Geographic about from sustainable food systems, in fact, genetically modified bananas that have been used to kind of solve and help malnutrition in Uganda.
The BBC News sites as well are highlighting professor Nick's papers in from sustainability, exploring the effectiveness of biodegradable rubbish bags using a citizen science project. And there's also we also had I'll read it out because it's written here. But we also was retweeted by Leonardo DiCaprio last year, which we're all very proud of. But again, it just kind of gives us an indication of the type of outreach that we're doing, which is both to, you know, obviously help build and develop the journals, but actually to help really develop and get the research out there so that it's seen where it needs to be seen.
Another aspect of work that we do with the journals, which I think is actually really important and really does help develop and raise the kind of impact of the work that we work there. You know, we work with a number of different partners to ensure that we're representing all voices through our journals. And just an example here from frontiers in water, which is partnered with global water adaptation.
And this is really to kind of bring together water practitioners to publish both with the journal and we do have a partnerships with them to kind of help and remove that barrier as well. And sustainable food systems while very successful journal of ours did mention before, it has an ongoing relationship with Iran, which is a coalition working on solutions to harmful waste within agriculture. And again, we work with them both in the journal in helping create get editors on board to kind of help really coordinate and bring together some of the best research in the field, but also, you know, working with them in their conferences and trying to find ways that we can just work with and support the field, you know, and giving them opportunities and ways to help further develop and get their work visible.
Another thing I wanted to briefly touch on as well was with some of the work we're doing beyond the actual journals itself. Um, and again, we've been working with a number of different organizations and we did a lot of work with the unfcc, the global innovation workshops, and we're kind of helping to bring together researchers in the field to speak at these events and to act as a kind of like knowledge partners.
And again, it's, it's going beyond what are kind of the traditional confines of a journal and trying to find ways that we can kind of help further develop research in this field and become a part of the conversation, if you like, on what's going on there through the work with the journals. And I'll make a mention here of a couple 28 and a couple has been mentioned before as well. But this is another area where we think we can actually help support the work that's going on with these particular organizations and groups by bringing together our editors and authors that publishing within our journal, but to also help them to kind of, you know, be part of the bigger discussions going on, which is taking the research that's been published and being part of the conversation, um, going on there.
And just to mention here about the science summit 2023, the falling walls organizing initiative that's going on there, we are active participants in some of the work that's going on there. We had a plenaries and we had some seminars and things like this that was all about climate action and, you know, some of the open horizon work that's going on there. So this is another important part of what we're doing as a company to help further develop the conversation.
That's that's. It's going on around in this particular area. Uh, just before I move on to a little bit, talking about what we do actually as a company. We've also last year on this year, February time is moving, Uh, moving fast, but so we had our first inaugural, if that's the right word. Uh, frontiers planet prize, which again, is about us trying to be more than just a destination for the research, but actually being there earlier in the process to give funding and to give opportunities to researchers in the field to further develop their research and to come up with with, with initiatives and work that is going to actually help lead us to a healthier planet.
So the planet prize was awarded in February. We awarded three prizes of 1 pound million and they were going to researchers active within the field of climate change, sustainability. Um, and in areas like this. And this was awarded to three national champions and then it's going to be repeated again next year. And ongoing on. So this is separate through the frontiers foundation, but obviously it's kind of linked to a lot of the work we're doing right now to really try to develop and build our, our, our role in what's going on here.
And just finally, just to wrap up, I just wanted to touch on a little bit what we're doing actually as a company. So this is not so much about some of our publishing activities, but again, we are very conscious about doing to help support the research and do it that way. But also, you know, kind of put our money where our mouth is, if you like, and, you know, try to kind of live and be a sustainable company.
We are all frontiers employees are working fully, remotely. So we're trying to reduce the carbon footprint by reducing commuting and things like this. And we are exclusively digital. So we are only publishing online. We don't have any paper products per se, and we have a few notepads occasionally at conferences. But I think, you know, in general, we're trying to kind of keep our carbon footprint to a minimum and we do a lot of work right now.
We have a sustainability group now within the company that started work and really starting trying to kind of enshrine these goods and throughout the company in every shape and in the ways that we kind of work there. So so this is, Where we are. And I got to say, I think it's you know, there's a lot of work to be done still and there's a lot of things we can be doing to help support researchers in the field.
But, um, but yeah, this is, this is where we are. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you very much, Graham. Appreciate it. Um, so we ended with about five minutes to go, so we will have some time for questions. So me think wanted to get us started here?
Yeah I have a question for Alyssa, actually. Um, so with the few minutes we have left. So, Alyssa, you know, we talked, we talked previously and this question, you know, Chris, you could chime in as well. And Graham but it's really for kind of the editors perspective, you know, climate change research and topic is nuance. And as you mentioned, is, you know, obviously controversial.
It can be controversial. It's also a topic that the media and the public is highly interested in. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the things that nature, climate change does to make sure that, you know, that the full picture of the story is presented and to avoid things being missed or miscommunicated. And sometimes it can lead to misinformation.
So that kind of effort. Yeah so one of the things that we do, particularly if we think if we have a paper that we think is going to get quite a lot of media coverage and there's some nuance there that should be communicated, is that we write press releases ourselves. So we always support researchers writing press releases through their institutions and institutions doing press releases, but we can also press release papers.
And so this would be a key point that we would make to argue for a press release in a particular paper to make sure that of information is communicated to journals. In addition to that, something that we do generally on all papers. Is make sure that the papers are written in a way that nuance is clear from the paper itself. And so the way our papers are formatted, there's sort of a shorter format with methods at the end.
But and so making sure that any discussion of nuance, any discussion of limitations or weaknesses in the approaches within the main body of the paper as soon as possible, basically, and not in a method section or a supplementary section has also been quite important to make sure that that information is there in the main paper. So that people have access to it and see it because yeah, credibility in climate science is it's really important to make sure that the papers are being.
Cited in the way that the research was actually done and can be cited. Thank you. Yeah, no, that's great. I think that's the takeaway from a lot of the publishers that's on the call here as well. You know, if you don't have a press office or, you know, not that type of organization that have that kind of resources, working with the authors and the way the paper's formatted and guidelines to ensure that it's, you know, presented in a certain way.
So those limitations aren't missed. OK thanks, Alyssa Clark, I you have some questions. Yeah, I have. I mean, I have a ton, but I think I've decided on. Excuse me, just this kind of one that I want to focus on a little bit because I think it involves Chris's commentary, which I'm very familiar with the discussion within academia to a lot of the points that Chris raised.
Um, both Graham and Alyssa, you both talked about, um, it's pertinent to climate science because it's such a timely sort of topic, but a lot of things that are they follow the theme to me of being society, like things that an Au or a society publisher engages in as an arm of their kind of mission. You expect advocacy. Hill this type of things from an agu, how it seems like you think that's important.
Could you speak to that, particularly in relation to Chris's point about the value being provided to publishers? It seems like climate science is an area where all of this extra stuff, anything post article of record, right post publication in the funding opportunities, things like these are a bit, um, unusual or a bit non-traditional coming from the publisher side, so don't really have a specific question, but could you comment on those various things and how you think about them strategically?
I mean, I'm happy to maybe jump in first. I mean, um, I know that I don't know if this is kind of answering the question directly, but but we put in we have this kind of overriding kind of objective within the company that is really about making science open. Do what I mean? And making it possible for for, for what is being published within the journal and the research that's coming through to be accessible and being used.
And we use the example quite a lot of obviously the COVID crisis quite recently and that, you know, the reason we were as a society able to move so quickly from it being identified and COVID to actually coming up with a vaccine, a working vaccine that could be used was because the science was pretty much open. You know, the sequencing and all the information was there and there was no kind of barrier to accessing that information so that everybody could really focus on in the same way.
And have access to the same information. And we see the same way with climate and sustainability science, you know, having that information available so that it can be used and really used and developed in such a way that we can come up with real solutions to the problems that we're going to be facing as a humanity, as, you know, with on the planet. And I think that is kind of a lot.
So a lot of what we're doing right now with regards to, we say promotion and impact of the papers that we're publishing. But it is all part of a bigger picture, which is to make sure that we get the information out there and make sure it's accessible and identified by people. So I don't know if that's actually addressing your question, but that's where we are.
The night. I'll just respond. I, I was actually on a owasp, a webinar a few weeks ago, which is probably how I got roped into this one. And actually one of the other panelists was a call him a meta researcher of the covid, the academic and publishing response to COVID. His name is lost on me at the moment, but I just posted a link to it in the chat.
Um, it was really an interesting contrast to how academia and the publishing industry responded to COVID and compared to climate. And there are, I agree. Graham there are parallels there, but the pace is it's hard to compare, right? Because the pace of these two problems is hard to compare. You know, the number of people affected in extremely negative ways, like dying on very short order is much more rapid than the pace of climate change.
We can sort of go about our daily lives and ignore climate change for a few days before you hear about it again. So obviously the response is going to be a different scale. But I like the I like I like the model that academia and publishing took in response to COVID. And I would certainly advocate ramping that up as we probably are to some extent for climate.
A clerk. It looks like we're over time. Yeah. And I guess we'll wrap up here. Um, I know we didn't have a lot of time for Q&A, but this is recorded, so, And you know, your wonderful speakers. Thank you for being here and for having this conversation.
Um, just a few closing thoughts. So again, Thanks to our panelists for this discussion and everything that you brought here today to, to Clark, our co-moderator. And for all of you who are here watching. I want to thank our 2023 education sponsors. Again, silverchair, 67, bricks, Taylor, Francis F1000 and more. And then, as put it in the chat, there's an evaluation form that will be sent via email.
Um, we encourage you to give us some feedback so we could improve in the future. Um, Yeah. And the discussion, the recording will be made available on the website, which will require a login to, to view. So with that we are done. Thank you again, everybody. Wishing you the best rest of your day, afternoon and evening.
Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Good bye.
Segment:0 .
Hello, everybody.
Thank you and welcome to today's webinar, climate change and publishing how publishers can make an impact. My name is Mia Ricci. I'm a member of the education committee and the director of publication operations at the Au. Before we start, I want to thank our 2023 education sponsors, silverchair, 67, bricks, Taylor Francis F1000 and moresca. We are grateful for your support.
So a few housekeeping items. Attendee microphones have been muted automatically, so please use the Q&A panel to answer your questions for the panelists. You can also use the chat feature to communicate with other participants or organizers. We have three panelists today, so we'll have a limited Q&A time. So I encourage all of you to put your questions and comments in the Q&A or the chat as you watch them present so the panelists can answer them there as well.
Closed captions have been enabled and you can view captions by selecting the More option on your screen and choosing show captions. This one hour session will be recorded and will be available to view in a few days. A quick note on the code of conduct and today's meeting. We are committed to diversity, equity and providing an inclusive meeting environment. Fostering open dialogue, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct.
We ask that all participants, whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner. And now I'm happy to introduce you to my co-moderator, Clark Holdsworth, education committee member and senior manager of communication and partnerships from Acton. Clark, over to you. Yeah Thank you, Mia.
Appreciate it. So I'm going to remind everyone of what our webinar is. Some of you may have signed up for it quite a while ago, so we'll cover the topic and then get into our three speakers that we have for today. So again, the topic is climate change and publishing how publishers can make an impact. There's two key points of view that we're going to be focusing on today.
What challenges will climate change Pose for the industry and what can scholarly publishers as science disseminators do to help advance climate change research? So as publishers, we know that there's a credibility and resources to play a key role in expediting the trajectory of climate change research globally by placing this important work front and center for decision makers at both the international and the regional levels.
They also have the opportunity to lead by example via their own solutions to the problems that climate change may Pose directly to the industry. And so our speakers today that we have are going to address the varied avenues by which scholarly publishers can engage with their audiences on climate change research. And so this is the I'm going to introduce all the speakers now so that we know who is on the panel.
Before we get to the Q&A. The first speaker that we'll have is Alyssa Findlay, senior editor, nature climate change, and Alyssa holds a PhD in oceanography from the University of Delaware. Importantly, her research area is consistent with the topic of research dissemination that we'll discuss today. It ranges from marine and Lake biogeochemistry to carbon cycling in Arctic marine sediments and integrated Chemical microbiological and modeling approaches.
Since joining nature climate change in 2019, she's handled manuscripts broadly in the area of climate change impacts vulnerability and adaptation. Our second speaker will be Chris kalinauskas, a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for research in environmental sciences and an associate professor in the Department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Additionally, Chris is the editor of geophysical research letters. Chris holds a doctorate from the University of Maryland, College park, an atmospheric and oceanic sciences. Chris also recently served on the scientific steering committee of the Uc Climate variability and predictability program. And then our third and final speaker will be Graham brumfield, head of journals frontiers.
Graham joined frontiers in 2022 to lead the sustainability, biosciences and programs. He contributes to frontiers titles that sit within the sustainability portfolio. And importantly, he's been working with researchers in this field to support their publishing activities and critical to this webinar. His work aims to provide tools and resources that help drive the impact and visibility of research in these fields.
So I think you're going to learn a little bit more about each speaker as they go through some of their experiences. So I'll leave it to them to elaborate and that can take us right into our first speaker. Alyssa Alyssa, if you want to join. All right. So you should see my slides now.
Yes um, can I just have confirmation that it worked? OK Yeah. So thank you, Clark, for the introduction. I'm happy. I'm very happy to be here today to talk about what journals can do in supporting climate change research coming from the perspective of nature, climate change. And so I can mostly skip this slide. Clark has already said most of this, but the one point I do want to emphasize is that my role at nature, climate change, is a full time job, which means that I am no longer actively engaged in research.
So I still engage with the research community, but I'm not doing my own work. So I'm a full time editor. And so that's the perspective that I'm bringing here for this work on nature, climate change. So enough about me. Just a quick background about nature, climate change. So it's part of the nature portfolio and we focus topically on the science of contemporary climate change, its impacts, implications for the economy, policy and society.
So paleoclimate work is not generally something that would be considered within the scope of the journal unless it's really quite heavily related to current climate change. We're a highly selective journal, which means that we're run by a team of full time professional editors like myself, and we sort of act as a proxy for our readership. And so a lot of papers are rejected without review because of our criteria of novelty and that broader interest.
So we cover, like I said, the theme of climate change rather than any particular discipline, making our coverage quite interdisciplinary. The first official volume was published in 2012 and we were the first thematic rather than discipline specific journal in the nature portfolio. We have 12 issues per year and our audience is very broad and includes researchers and in all of the disciplines that that touch on climate change as well as policy makers and people in industry.
And then in addition to original primary research. So science, we do publish other format types and I'll talk a bit more about those later. For example, opinion comment, content reviews and these sorts of things. So like I said, and like it's in the journal nature, climate change is our scope. And so one of the ways that we try to help support research, climate change research is to focus on specific topics.
And so this might be organizing a collection where there's a lot of work been going on to try to help kind of organize some of what's been going on or do a focus issue on some topic that's particularly timely, particularly relevant, potentially also connected to a particular event. And so here are some examples that we've done in the past. So we had a collection ahead of cop26 trying to support the key aims of that conference, and that was archived content from our journal as well as a few other sister journals to try to really put the spotlight on relevant research that had been done to support the discussions going on at cop.
We also had a focus issue a few years ago on forest carbon. This is when there were a lot of really key papers that key research happening about the ability of forests to take up carbon and that using that as a mitigation strategy. So we did a focus issue to try to push particular topics and continue the conversation around that. And currently we've got a collection going on as well as a call for papers around progress towards sustainable development goals, which includes climate action.
So this is just a few different examples of how we try to support within, you know, the broad theme of climate change to support different research areas at a particular time. So because we're a thematic journal rather than discipline specific, our readership is interdisciplinary by nature. And this also means that we've been historically a home and are continued to be a home for work that might not fit into a field specific journal.
So this can be collaborations between social and natural scientists, which is becoming more and more important within the climate change space in the mitigation side is really important moving forward, but it can also be collaborations between natural scientists, between biologists and physicists, particularly as climate change is an environmental issue and the effects are felt so broadly. Bringing people together from different fields is critical to further to further work here.
And so I wanted to just discuss a few things that we've learned from our perspective about how to support these sorts of interdisciplinary papers. But before I do that, the one caveat is that not all work needs to be interdisciplinary to be impactful. We publish interdisciplinary work, but we also publish discipline specific work. So just that one caveat.
So one of the main things that editors can do to support the publication of interdisciplinary work, particularly in climate change, is to really be aware of issues and challenges within different fields as well as the language each field uses. And so we sort of need to act a bit as a translator between the reviewers. And then with reviewers and authors to help them understand what does need to be done.
What are the, um, what are, what are the reviewers asking? Basically, what are the aspects that need to be revised. It's also our responsibility to ensure that reviewers can comment on all aspects of a study. And this means, you know, if a paper is particularly interdisciplinary, maybe we need to 4 or 5 reviewers to make sure that each aspect of that paper is evaluated and that it's on solid ground. And then when particularly when working with so many reviewers, is making sure that we have good communications with authors and reviewers.
And so reviewers might comment on different aspects of a study and they're providing their perspective. But we really want to weigh the expertise of different reviewers when communicating to authors what changes might be necessary to the study and what are the critical areas. Because what can happen is, you know, a reviewer comments on a study, those comments are sort of in contrast to what another reviewer has said, and then the authors don't know how to proceed.
And then finally sort of post publication is that we can and do commission related content to help explain a particular study or explain relevance to a broader readership. So I want to get a little bit more into our content types because this is one of the ways that we do try to support both climate change research and dissemination of climate change research. So beyond sort of the standard research and review articles, we offer other format types, including opinion content, which helps to set a research agenda or bring attention to a particular important issue either within the field or sort of trying to translate a particular issue to policy.
We also offer analysis, and this is a study where the analysis itself is useful and novel rather than the results per se. And then excitingly, in the past few years, we've introduced policy briefs and these are really targeted at policy makers, and they're meant to make the results of a study that we've published more accessible to policymakers. And so here are just some examples of those. So this first one is just a perspective that evaluated the major climate change scenario framework used by the IPCC.
And a lot of modelers sort of evaluating where it's been and where it should go. The second one is an example of an analysis that just looked at whether deforestation alerts work or don't work to hinder illegal deforestation in the tropics. And then finally, an example of a policy brief that was published again on a paper that we published. And this one was about renewable, renewable energy certificates.
And then just to get a little bit more in depth from the policy brief, because this is a really important format, this is what they look like, they're very short. So most of the information is on the first page, a very brief summary of what the problem is for policy, what the study did and what the findings are. And the second page is a figure and maybe some further reading. So it's really meant to be the key information is front and center in one page, so policymakers don't need to read a whole paper to get the key, the key findings that are relevant for their work.
Um, and so finally, just a few other initiatives that the journal offers generally to support research and open research and transparency in research is providing a full text of the PDF version that can be shared without getting a paywall supporting posting preprints before review. Having authors link their ORCID so that you can more easily identify who the authors are and then ensuring that all papers have a data encoded availability statement and encouraging data where possible to be openly accessible.
So in addition to supporting research, we also do try to support science communication and the communication of the work that we publish. So sort of around and following publication, we try to make sure that the articles are written accessibly. So trying to limit use of jargon or very technical terms in the main body of the work we write, press releases, we commission on Publish related content, whether that's a comment or sort of a news infused type article offering a different perspective on a published piece of work.
So here's just an example of that. Here's a paper that we published, a research paper, and then it was a bit, a bit nuanced, this particular piece that we asked them, we publish this news and views that sort of unpacked some of the nuance and the pros and cons of what the authors had done there. We also offer sort of these blog type community pages where editors and authors can post stories behind the paper or unpack their paper for a different audience.
We also have across the company Twitter and WeChat channels, as well as regional news sites that offer research news in local languages. And this is just a screenshot from nature Africa, which has news articles in French. And so following from that, one of the key things is that we do try to support a diversity of perspectives in climate change research and try to reach a broad audience with the dissemination of the results.
Climate change impacts are global, but they do disproportionately impact communities in the global south, as well as historically marginalized communities. And we at nature, climate change really believe that we have a responsibility to make sure that their voices are part of the global conversation around climate change, science impacts and policy, even if.
They're not, you know, actively doing research. So one of the ways that we try to support the diversity of perspectives is by making sure our reviewers represent a diverse pool of researchers and scientists by inviting content to highlight or to elevate a particular perspective or voice by doing targeted outreach, visiting institutions in particular areas, or speaking with researchers in particular areas by offering alternative content types.
And I'll show a few examples of those later. And this is particularly key for those people who might not be engaged in scientific research but whose perspectives are important in the global climate change conversation. And then finally, we do offer alternative publishing options. As I mentioned, climate change is highly selective, but not all. Just because we've rejected a paper doesn't mean the study is not important.
And so making sure that we try to find a good home for those papers as well within our journal portfolio. So one of the content types that we use to try to highlight additional voices would be features. So this first one is just an example of a photo feature that I'd organized a few years ago speaking with photographers who were working on environmental issues and trying to capture the kind of change impacts in their countries.
And we highlighted their photos in this particular piece, as well as a viewpoint that we recently published focusing on researchers in the African continent and what they thought were the key. The key topics in their areas moving forward. So focusing on a regional perspective. And then something else that we do is question and answer type content. And so here's an example of a Q&A that we did as part of that forest focus talking about indigenous forest management.
So talking with indigenous practitioners, indigenous peoples and their perspectives on forest management, again, these are not people who would be publishing scientific content but have something valuable to offer to the climate change conversation. And then more recently we had a question and answer session with the outgoing IPCC chair.
So finally, I have some thoughts about what publishers can do to support journals to help support climate change research and researchers. And one of the key points is that press support is very helpful. So climate change is a very contentious topic, and editors and researchers can get hate mail comments on social media, as well as blogs and media coverage.
And many of you may have seen there was a recent blog posting about climate change, a climate change paper that was published in Nature. And it was very important that the editor of nature had that press support to really know how to engage and when to engage and how to engage with these sorts of comments is very important. So that's, I think, the key point. And then some other things that initiatives that we have at nature is nature conferences that would focus on a particular topic, as well as master classes that are meant to support writing researchers and writing research articles and communicating the results.
So with that, I will Thank you for your time and listening. And I guess we'll take questions in the chat and later as well. All right. Thank you very much, Alice. Appreciate it. I have some questions already, but of course, I'll be very patient with those. For the attendees, if you do have questions, it would be great if you, as each speaker goes through, feel free to throw them into the Q&A function at this time.
That way we can sort of plan out and make sure that we get all the questions addressed. So, Chris, you're all set to take it away now. Thanks, Clark. Just going to share my screen. Slides coming through. OK? yes, those look good.
Great well, Thank you for the introduction earlier. As Clark said, I'm Chris Karnofsky and I'm at the University of Colorado, Boulder. There's a beautiful view of our campus from above there. But I yeah, I find myself at the intersection of these two constructs that are in the webinar title, climate change and publishing. Slight, slightly in contrast to Dr. Finley, I'm an editor as well, but I'm an editor for a society journal, namely a journal that's run by the American Geophysical union and published by Wiley.
So it's more of a volunteer basis. And I'm a practicing scientist still, so I study climate change in various ways and have for most of my career. All of my degrees come from atmospheric and oceanic sciences, and all the papers I've published have something to do with climate variability and change. Um, I lead an active research group that consists of postdocs, PhD students, master's students and even undergrads.
And then as a professor, of course, I go into the classroom to a few times a week to try to help the next generation of adults, industry leaders, voters try to understand the science of climate change. So, um, yeah, in my recent, in recent years, I think sort of in my capacity as a journal editor and as an individual scientist, I've expended some energy trying to support open access and open science.
And so actually most of my remarks this morning will be about open science and sort of how important that is for, um, sort of as a way that scholarly, the scholarly publishing industry can help solve the climate crisis. So here's all of my key points and I'm going to go through most of these just like with a slide to sort of illustrate my point. But my first point, since I'm a scientist and a professor, I have to show you a graph or I wouldn't be much of a professor.
So, you know, we're conducting a massive, uncontrolled, uncontrolled experiment with Earth's climate right now. And this is a little graph that I made from existing data that represents the carbon dioxide concentration in the global atmosphere, and it shows it over almost the last million years and it goes up and down over time. That is due to the glacial interglacial cycles and then added on to that long term record that goes back 800,000 years is the monolo CO2 record, which is a direct measurement of CO2 in a pristine environment.
And it shows this sort of obvious departure from the normal fluctuations in it. I've marked a few different years on there. 1882 would be sort of marked here just as a rough indicator of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when I was born. So you can do the math. And then when I became a dad, so you can sort of tell these increments of time are shorter, which means things are really accelerating rapidly.
Looking forward to where we're going, not looking forward to it, but looking ahead. Um, there's a number of possible Futures and what we do now will ultimately determine where we end up in the year 2100. And funny enough, the acronyms for these different scenarios are actually SSP, which is not has nothing to do with the Society of scholarly publishers, but perhaps it's kind of a nice coincidence anyways.
Um, and so we could end up just a tiny bit above where we are, and that's a situation where we meet low challenges to mitigation, meaning reducing our emissions and adaptation. And frankly, that that ship has almost sailed, as you can tell. We're almost to that point now. And then the future perfectly within the realm of possibility, all depending on what we do as a global society, could put us at CO2 levels that are several times higher than what it is now, potentially over 1,000 parts per million where we're at like 400 rides now.
So this is a really scary situation to be in. And we're right at the cusp of going and knowing over the next several decades where we're going to end up. And Lisa talked about the sustainable development goals, which have a lot to do with trying to reduce emissions. And as you can see, ever since we started measuring. So if we just Zoom in on the very end of the graph here, just the last several decades, going back to about 1960, you can see the carbon dioxide curve.
Going up rather relentlessly, despite the fact that in the 70s we climate, scientists started using pretty sophisticated methods to make predictions about global warming, most of which have turned out to be right so far. And the Paris Climate Agreement went into force in 2016. And you can see that the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere didn't even flinch. So this is sort of what we're faced with and what I, as a scientist am working on.
You probably have been following the news if you're on this webinar, so you're probably aware that last, last, last semester, last month was, you know, a record shattering global temperature by a record shattering amount. So these are all of the September temperature anomalies going back in time. And then you can see this last month's is just outrageously higher than others.
And there's a lot of interesting scientific things going into that. It's not all global warming. It's a lot of this is global warming, but there's some natural fluctuations on top of it that are interesting as well. But that's definitely on brand with the trend that we're seeing. So we are again conducting a massive uncontrolled experiment with Earth's climate right now.
And as scientists and publishers and scientists who publish, we need to do what we can to help solve this problem. And I have become convinced that we can't do that if our collective and rapidly evolving knowledge is hidden behind paywalls or if we have to email strangers to get the data. So I refer to this piece written by the former editor in chief of oceans, Peter brewer, who was a Chemical who is a Chemical oceanographer, worked at mbari.
And this is a really nice piece. And he talks about a situation in 2016 when he was supposed to be writing this big synthesis of what we know about a certain problem related to all this and ultimately couldn't get the raw data from all the know, from the various studies that he's trying to, you know, review and synthesize. And I love this quote at the end, you know.
So he emails the people who write the papers and they all say, you know, data available upon request. I'm sure at the end of the paper. And then not once did I receive a sure. I'm happy to do that. It was delay, obfuscation, please, of being busy and so on. Um, you know, he's talking about Excel spreadsheets with a few columns of data.
It's not hard to share if you can find it, but it wasn't available or easy to find. So the ugly truth is that in some cases, he was reduced to blowing up figures on the copier and drawing pencil lines across the image in order to figure out what the data points, what numbers those data points had so he could compile them with other data. So that's a problem. We need to be sharing our data.
And as I'll show you in my next point actually, that journals and funding. Funding agencies are doing something about that. And we need to keep doing that. Um, but more broadly, the entire climate research enterprise depends critically on open science. And I'm speaking as a climate researcher, but I'm sure this is true of other fields as well. But I know it's especially true in climate, atmospheric science, oceanography, all of the sort of Earth Sciences that touch on climate change.
And actually, I've, you know, once in a while I become aware of the situation in other fields. And I have to say it's actually a pretty great time to be a climate scientist. It is amazing how much you can do sitting at a computer in terms of acquiring data, analyzing data, doing some really cool stuff, just as a, you know, a little depiction of what I'm talking about. We have satellites orbiting the Earth that are taking amazing measurements of things like sea level rise, temperature in the atmosphere, temperature at the surface, ice mass on Greenland, all of these things that are relevant to climate.
We've got these satellites orbiting the Earth and they're just giving the data right back down to data centers on Earth. And in almost every case, unless it's something classified by the military, which probably not studying climate change anyway, you and I can just go online and click buttons and download it. You have to sort of have some experience in handling large data files and working with it.
But, you know, in principle this is accessible to everybody. Here's another example. This is this is from today. This is a map that shows every one of these little points is a location where one of these guys are one of these Argo profilers or Argo floats, they're called. And what these things do is Bob up and down in the ocean, Bob up and down by like a couple of kilometers. And they measure temperature and salinity of the seawater as they go up and down.
And so that map is just remarkable to me that all of those places are a place where we have one of these. Right now. There are almost 4,000 of these Argo floats out there. And you can go online, click a button and have the data all to do whatever you want with it freely, quickly, publicly. And this is the kind of norm in our field, which is just wonderful.
We can do a lot of work with what we have available, that the taxpayers are putting a lot of money up to produce. Of course, one of the issues that I'm also talking about is what do the taxpayers get back? How, you know, they're not the ones typically doing that work and discovering things about science. It's the scientists doing that. And then we're publishing our papers.
And then there's a bit of an issue about whether or not the public has access to those papers. So that's a huge problem that I'll talk about in just a second here. But I'm just showing you screen grabs here from these various websites that I'm kind of alluding to, like noaa, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Here's a website where you can go and just click and download without registering or doing anything.
You know, these big gridded climate data sets that you can analyze for their own sake or cross analyze with something societally relevant or ecologically relevant or whatever you want to do. Nasa has very similar data repositories where you can, in principle, any measurement that Nasa makes ultimately becomes part of the Open Data record. So it's great.
On top of measurements, we also have climate models. So Dr. Finley also referred to global climate models, or she referred to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, IPCC reports and how important those are. And those are really Fed by climate, largely Fed. I would say many chapters in the IPCC reports are Fed their information by the results of global climate model experiments. And again, all of those climate model experiments, if they go into the IPCC report, all of the output gets archived into these data sets or into these sort of data servers that you can go online.
For this one, you have to register, but it's free. You just basically are giving your email address. Then you log in and you can download any model you want, any output you want, any experiment past or future, and, you know, study the climate system. However, you wish. And it's just amazing. Um, OK. And so that's great for these large sort of global data sets that would benefit everybody.
Of course, that's not what that piece by Peter Brewer was really referring to. He's probably talking about Chemical measurements that were made in one piece lab, and it's on a spreadsheet that's saved on their old laptop, you know, and so these open data policies by journals such as Au or the Public Library of science, all the journals, they all say very similar things that if you submit at some point in the process of submitting and publishing a paper with them, you've got to provide at least enough data that makes the science reproducible, because that's what good science really is, is if it's reproducible, if your experiment is reproducible, it's robust science.
And so we just want to make sure that we can do that. Whether people are really going and doing it is another question. But in principle, the data needs to be available to double check things and to use it for other purposes that you can't even predict as a scientist when you're doing your science. So there's these things that say this. I can tell you as an editor who's been an editor for Jay for a couple different journals for the past decade plus, enforcement can be complicated.
You know, we no longer accept email. The author. If you want the data, you know, you actually have to post it somewhere publicly. But it's hard to have the human resources to check that every file that's posted is actually providing enough data and whatnot. But this is a really great step in the right direction. And a lot of funding agencies are actually requiring it as well, not just the journals.
So this is great. And it's just an example from a recent paper that I published in GRL that was about hurricanes in the North Atlantic and how climate change, climate change will affect it. And we used a repository called zenodo where you can for free upload, you know, relatively large data set documented a little bit enough so that a stranger can download it and use it is a pretty painless process.
Actually we did. We did. We post all of the output from, you know, the entire climate model experiment. No, that would be very burdensome. And just an enormous volume of data. But we did post enough of the data that someone can reproduce our results in that paper. And then really one of my final points here is that for some reason, folks in my field have been relatively slow to embrace open access.
We're really big on open data. For the most part, it's open access that physical climate scientists seem to be a little slower to embrace. I don't know why a few ideas to throw out there is that, you know, publishing, there's a whole, you know, business model and a change in business model. When a journal goes open access, it's shifting the burden of the cost around.
And for example, when the journal that I'm an editor for right now, when we went open access, the cost went from just a bargain of $500 a paper where if you publish it in that way, people out in the public can't just immediately go download that paper and read it for free. You've got to be at a University with a, you know, a subscription to that journal or pay as a one time payment for that one paper.
When we went open access, the cost to the author increased to 2900 bucks, which still isn't terrible when you think about the scale of federal grants and this is sort of a normal expense within a grant but it varies a lot plus climate's around the same science advances is science magazine's open access cousin and nature's open access fees are, in my view, very high, close to $112,000 to publish open access in nature.
And so that this can be a real problem. If you don't have big external grants to publish your papers, then these costs, even $2,900 can be prohibitive. Um, you know, there's other dynamics within academia beyond just the economics. You know, we well, it's still economics. We're in a prestige economy and in academia. So are we still too concerned with the prestige and influence of that?
Traditionally comes with certain journals that are traditionally non. Are we academics? You know, like me. Just too busy to take this up right now. Part of that is probably true. And do we not really even notice the problem since, you know, sitting here in my office at the University of Colorado, I can, you know, fire up a web browser and go to probably any journal I'm interested in and read papers without any hassle.
But if I'm at home, I can't. And therefore, a taxpayer who's at home not affiliated with a research institution has that same problem. They can't read the paper that their tax dollars funded, and that's not right. And so I think another dynamic here is that we're just kind of still looking the other way. And not talking about it enough. And when I do, I am part of conversations or hear conversations where the obvious unfairness and frankly, exploitation in the system where, you know, the scientists who are producing the producing the research, writing the proposals, producing the research, we're all volunteering to peer review each other's papers.
And in a lot of cases, we're volunteer editors to run that whole process. And then we hand it over. And that's clearly a system built to profit publishers. So I'm not holding back just today. And then there's some issues within academia in terms of moving the goalpost when you get tenured. And I hear a lot of colleagues, as soon as they get tenure, make proclamations like I'm only going to publish an open access journals.
And it's sort of like, well, good for you. You got where you are by publishing in nature. So I'm not going to say more about that because I don't think it's as much interest to this, this, this crowd. But that's yeah, that's all my slides. And I will stop now and hopefully there's some Q&A in the end.
Thanks very much, Chris. Appreciate it. Again, some more questions from my end, but we'll get there eventually. If you do have questions again, please enter them for us. It's going to help me a ton because I'm going to have to be going through and sort of Fielding these. So please, if you have any questions or comments that arise from this discussion points that you'd like to hear from the speakers on, please do so.
But with that, Graham, I'll let you get started and wrap us up for the third presentation. Thank you very much. Can you just let me know when you can see my slides. So that I'm able to. Presents can you hear me? Yes yep, you can hear you. And yeah, slides just came up.
So you are good to go, Graham. Thank you very much. So, yeah, so Thank you for that. Thank you for inviting me to come and present at this, this, this particular session. As, as you said in the introduction, I'm currently the head of journals for well, actually I've just recently moved from the sustainability portfolio to the within frontiers.
I've been at the company now for, well, nearly two years. And in that time, as part of the time was working on the sustainability portfolio, which is why I think I'm here and hopefully I can give you a bit of an overview of what we're doing here. I just wanted to make mention of Chloe Boyd. She's one of the journal managers we've got here, and she's really primarily managing the bigger sustainability journals in our portfolio.
So just wanted to make mention of her because she's been absolutely instrumental in me helping put together these slides for us. So if I can just move to the next slide and to give you a bit of an overview about what we're going to be talking about, just now and want to take two strands, really wanted to just talk a little bit about the journals we have within our portfolio and what we're doing to really help, help researchers and authors in this field, how we can help them to both get their work published, but also kind of promote it further down the road and give them an opportunity to kind of really have the most impact for what they're working on.
And that's something that we quite heavily invested in. And then want to talk a little bit about some of the things we're doing outside of the core publishing arena, some of the outreach work we're doing and some of the kind of more open science approach, advocacy that we're doing. And then just finally touching very briefly on what we're doing actually as a company to kind of act in a sustainable fashion in business.
Um, so just before I talk about the journals, I wanted to kind of just make mention of the frontiers mission, which obviously we've been around for a few years. We're one of the newer block, so to speak, but we are 100% open access. Digital publishers, so all of our journals are free at the point of access, and we work through an agency model which has been touched on, on, on previously as well.
Um, and our primary method of promoting sustainability as Publisher is really developing content around key issues we work on, on a, on a way of having a number of journals. And within those journals we develop, um, we kind of research topics, but they're kind of like central core areas of research that we think there is going to be a lot of interest and little communities that are building up around this area.
These are the springboard to kind of pulling the research and pulling in authors and researchers around these central themes. And this is what's driving us in what we're doing. And we've got a number of journals already. Um, and when we started to build the sustainability portfolio, we really started working on the sustainable development goals. And there's a number of those and we started to build journals around these areas.
So for example, frontiers in sustainable food systems is our kind of oldest journal in this particular area, managed by Chloe, in fact, and this was set around number two, which is Zealand. And you know, the idea being it's a multidisciplinary journal highlighting issues from farm to fork, and we're using that as a way to really drive and really support researchers in this particular field.
Have a number of other journals as well. We have frontiers in forests and global change, and this was launched around SDG number 15. And again, this is publishing research in the protection policy and management of forests. Um, and we also have a number of other journals as well that I think, you know, you can see on this particular slide here, we've got frontiers in climate, frontiers in sustainability, sustainable cities, and also one in water, which has launched a fairly recently.
And these are focused around 13, eight, nine, 11 and, and so we're using this as a framework so that we're in a position to be able to really offer a platform for researchers, key researchers, publishing, you know, really important valuable work in this area. And this is all part of what we're doing as a publisher in general. And and I think the way that we're trying to support researchers in the sustainability field is the way we will try to support researchers in any field, whether it be oncology or chemistry or any of these areas.
And so we don't have any distinction between the types of journals we're publishing and the types of support we give. You know, we're using the same systems, the same platforms, the same outreach, the same impacts, tools to try to develop these areas of research. So I think this more than anything has really given us a kind of a good opportunity to, you know, work with some of the best editors in the field who are coming on board, really kind of, you know, able to help kind of shape and build the direction that these journals are going in.
And hopefully we are in a certain extent kind of trying to really support authors in this field. And it was mentioned a little bit before as well about how we can support authors following publication. So, um, the way we kind of work in this. So obviously we have the communities that are built around the journals and having. As purely open access means that there is no barrier to access.
So it means that a lot of these journals where we're working in particular areas where there's a lot of research going on in less well funded areas and regions, and put it this way. And they obviously can get access to the research and do obviously have um, Uh, policies in place to kind of help authors from these less well funded areas to kind of help them to overcome some of the apcs that we have there.
Obviously, this is the way that we're working. Um, but we are kind of working out and using our editors and our editors are working with us to really help reach out to academic policy makers figures. And then also, more importantly on this slide, what we're talking about here, you know, the mainstream media and trying to find ways to help disseminate research to both within the academic field but also outside of the academic field.
I just wanted to make a point, just kind of highlight a few things here from this particular slide, because we do have certain amount of success. And again, this is all down to really the quality of research that we're publishing. But we've had some coverage in National Geographic about from sustainable food systems, in fact, genetically modified bananas that have been used to kind of solve and help malnutrition in Uganda.
The BBC News sites as well are highlighting professor Nick's papers in from sustainability, exploring the effectiveness of biodegradable rubbish bags using a citizen science project. And there's also we also had I'll read it out because it's written here. But we also was retweeted by Leonardo DiCaprio last year, which we're all very proud of. But again, it just kind of gives us an indication of the type of outreach that we're doing, which is both to, you know, obviously help build and develop the journals, but actually to help really develop and get the research out there so that it's seen where it needs to be seen.
Another aspect of work that we do with the journals, which I think is actually really important and really does help develop and raise the kind of impact of the work that we work there. You know, we work with a number of different partners to ensure that we're representing all voices through our journals. And just an example here from frontiers in water, which is partnered with global water adaptation.
And this is really to kind of bring together water practitioners to publish both with the journal and we do have a partnerships with them to kind of help and remove that barrier as well. And sustainable food systems while very successful journal of ours did mention before, it has an ongoing relationship with Iran, which is a coalition working on solutions to harmful waste within agriculture. And again, we work with them both in the journal in helping create get editors on board to kind of help really coordinate and bring together some of the best research in the field, but also, you know, working with them in their conferences and trying to find ways that we can just work with and support the field, you know, and giving them opportunities and ways to help further develop and get their work visible.
Another thing I wanted to briefly touch on as well was with some of the work we're doing beyond the actual journals itself. Um, and again, we've been working with a number of different organizations and we did a lot of work with the unfcc, the global innovation workshops, and we're kind of helping to bring together researchers in the field to speak at these events and to act as a kind of like knowledge partners.
And again, it's, it's going beyond what are kind of the traditional confines of a journal and trying to find ways that we can kind of help further develop research in this field and become a part of the conversation, if you like, on what's going on there through the work with the journals. And I'll make a mention here of a couple 28 and a couple has been mentioned before as well. But this is another area where we think we can actually help support the work that's going on with these particular organizations and groups by bringing together our editors and authors that publishing within our journal, but to also help them to kind of, you know, be part of the bigger discussions going on, which is taking the research that's been published and being part of the conversation, um, going on there.
And just to mention here about the science summit 2023, the falling walls organizing initiative that's going on there, we are active participants in some of the work that's going on there. We had a plenaries and we had some seminars and things like this that was all about climate action and, you know, some of the open horizon work that's going on there. So this is another important part of what we're doing as a company to help further develop the conversation.
That's that's. It's going on around in this particular area. Uh, just before I move on to a little bit, talking about what we do actually as a company. We've also last year on this year, February time is moving, Uh, moving fast, but so we had our first inaugural, if that's the right word. Uh, frontiers planet prize, which again, is about us trying to be more than just a destination for the research, but actually being there earlier in the process to give funding and to give opportunities to researchers in the field to further develop their research and to come up with with, with initiatives and work that is going to actually help lead us to a healthier planet.
So the planet prize was awarded in February. We awarded three prizes of 1 pound million and they were going to researchers active within the field of climate change, sustainability. Um, and in areas like this. And this was awarded to three national champions and then it's going to be repeated again next year. And ongoing on. So this is separate through the frontiers foundation, but obviously it's kind of linked to a lot of the work we're doing right now to really try to develop and build our, our, our role in what's going on here.
And just finally, just to wrap up, I just wanted to touch on a little bit what we're doing actually as a company. So this is not so much about some of our publishing activities, but again, we are very conscious about doing to help support the research and do it that way. But also, you know, kind of put our money where our mouth is, if you like, and, you know, try to kind of live and be a sustainable company.
We are all frontiers employees are working fully, remotely. So we're trying to reduce the carbon footprint by reducing commuting and things like this. And we are exclusively digital. So we are only publishing online. We don't have any paper products per se, and we have a few notepads occasionally at conferences. But I think, you know, in general, we're trying to kind of keep our carbon footprint to a minimum and we do a lot of work right now.
We have a sustainability group now within the company that started work and really starting trying to kind of enshrine these goods and throughout the company in every shape and in the ways that we kind of work there. So so this is, Where we are. And I got to say, I think it's you know, there's a lot of work to be done still and there's a lot of things we can be doing to help support researchers in the field.
But, um, but yeah, this is, this is where we are. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you very much, Graham. Appreciate it. Um, so we ended with about five minutes to go, so we will have some time for questions. So me think wanted to get us started here?
Yeah I have a question for Alyssa, actually. Um, so with the few minutes we have left. So, Alyssa, you know, we talked, we talked previously and this question, you know, Chris, you could chime in as well. And Graham but it's really for kind of the editors perspective, you know, climate change research and topic is nuance. And as you mentioned, is, you know, obviously controversial.
It can be controversial. It's also a topic that the media and the public is highly interested in. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the things that nature, climate change does to make sure that, you know, that the full picture of the story is presented and to avoid things being missed or miscommunicated. And sometimes it can lead to misinformation.
So that kind of effort. Yeah so one of the things that we do, particularly if we think if we have a paper that we think is going to get quite a lot of media coverage and there's some nuance there that should be communicated, is that we write press releases ourselves. So we always support researchers writing press releases through their institutions and institutions doing press releases, but we can also press release papers.
And so this would be a key point that we would make to argue for a press release in a particular paper to make sure that of information is communicated to journals. In addition to that, something that we do generally on all papers. Is make sure that the papers are written in a way that nuance is clear from the paper itself. And so the way our papers are formatted, there's sort of a shorter format with methods at the end.
But and so making sure that any discussion of nuance, any discussion of limitations or weaknesses in the approaches within the main body of the paper as soon as possible, basically, and not in a method section or a supplementary section has also been quite important to make sure that that information is there in the main paper. So that people have access to it and see it because yeah, credibility in climate science is it's really important to make sure that the papers are being.
Cited in the way that the research was actually done and can be cited. Thank you. Yeah, no, that's great. I think that's the takeaway from a lot of the publishers that's on the call here as well. You know, if you don't have a press office or, you know, not that type of organization that have that kind of resources, working with the authors and the way the paper's formatted and guidelines to ensure that it's, you know, presented in a certain way.
So those limitations aren't missed. OK thanks, Alyssa Clark, I you have some questions. Yeah, I have. I mean, I have a ton, but I think I've decided on. Excuse me, just this kind of one that I want to focus on a little bit because I think it involves Chris's commentary, which I'm very familiar with the discussion within academia to a lot of the points that Chris raised.
Um, both Graham and Alyssa, you both talked about, um, it's pertinent to climate science because it's such a timely sort of topic, but a lot of things that are they follow the theme to me of being society, like things that an Au or a society publisher engages in as an arm of their kind of mission. You expect advocacy. Hill this type of things from an agu, how it seems like you think that's important.
Could you speak to that, particularly in relation to Chris's point about the value being provided to publishers? It seems like climate science is an area where all of this extra stuff, anything post article of record, right post publication in the funding opportunities, things like these are a bit, um, unusual or a bit non-traditional coming from the publisher side, so don't really have a specific question, but could you comment on those various things and how you think about them strategically?
I mean, I'm happy to maybe jump in first. I mean, um, I know that I don't know if this is kind of answering the question directly, but but we put in we have this kind of overriding kind of objective within the company that is really about making science open. Do what I mean? And making it possible for for, for what is being published within the journal and the research that's coming through to be accessible and being used.
And we use the example quite a lot of obviously the COVID crisis quite recently and that, you know, the reason we were as a society able to move so quickly from it being identified and COVID to actually coming up with a vaccine, a working vaccine that could be used was because the science was pretty much open. You know, the sequencing and all the information was there and there was no kind of barrier to accessing that information so that everybody could really focus on in the same way.
And have access to the same information. And we see the same way with climate and sustainability science, you know, having that information available so that it can be used and really used and developed in such a way that we can come up with real solutions to the problems that we're going to be facing as a humanity, as, you know, with on the planet. And I think that is kind of a lot.
So a lot of what we're doing right now with regards to, we say promotion and impact of the papers that we're publishing. But it is all part of a bigger picture, which is to make sure that we get the information out there and make sure it's accessible and identified by people. So I don't know if that's actually addressing your question, but that's where we are.
The night. I'll just respond. I, I was actually on a owasp, a webinar a few weeks ago, which is probably how I got roped into this one. And actually one of the other panelists was a call him a meta researcher of the covid, the academic and publishing response to COVID. His name is lost on me at the moment, but I just posted a link to it in the chat.
Um, it was really an interesting contrast to how academia and the publishing industry responded to COVID and compared to climate. And there are, I agree. Graham there are parallels there, but the pace is it's hard to compare, right? Because the pace of these two problems is hard to compare. You know, the number of people affected in extremely negative ways, like dying on very short order is much more rapid than the pace of climate change.
We can sort of go about our daily lives and ignore climate change for a few days before you hear about it again. So obviously the response is going to be a different scale. But I like the I like I like the model that academia and publishing took in response to COVID. And I would certainly advocate ramping that up as we probably are to some extent for climate.
A clerk. It looks like we're over time. Yeah. And I guess we'll wrap up here. Um, I know we didn't have a lot of time for Q&A, but this is recorded, so, And you know, your wonderful speakers. Thank you for being here and for having this conversation.
Um, just a few closing thoughts. So again, Thanks to our panelists for this discussion and everything that you brought here today to, to Clark, our co-moderator. And for all of you who are here watching. I want to thank our 2023 education sponsors. Again, silverchair, 67, bricks, Taylor, Francis F1000 and more. And then, as put it in the chat, there's an evaluation form that will be sent via email.
Um, we encourage you to give us some feedback so we could improve in the future. Um, Yeah. And the discussion, the recording will be made available on the website, which will require a login to, to view. So with that we are done. Thank you again, everybody. Wishing you the best rest of your day, afternoon and evening.
Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Good bye.
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