Software and data citation are emerging best practices in scholarly communication. This article provides structured guidance to the academic publishing community on how to implement software and data citation in publishing workflows. These best practices support the verifiability and reproducibility of scientific results; sharing and reuse of valuable data and software tools, and attribution to the creators of the software and data. While data citation is increasingly well-established, software citation is rapidly maturing. With the current intensive use of software, including specialized tools and models for scientific research problems, the research community has begun to recognize that software, as a key research result and resource, requires the same level of transparency, accessibility, and disclosure as data. Software and data that support scientific results should be preserved and shared in scientific repositories for discovery, transparency, and use by other researchers. These goals can be supported by citing these products in the Reference Section of papers and effectively associating them to the software and data preserved in scientific repositories. Publishers need to mark up these references in a specific way to enable downstream processes, specifically those that enable automated attribution. Academic publishers wishing to stay current with best practices in the field are encouraged to follow the guidance provided here.

The National Science Foundation provided support to the American Geophysical Union (AGU) to engage its relevant community and help clarify the need for a Near-Surface Geophysics (NSG) Center and identify how it could advance key science questions, provide benefits for society, and develop the geophysical workforce of the future. This report synthesizes the broad input from the community. The listed authors represent the Steering Committee, led by Sarah Kruse and Xavier Comas, and AGU staff leads. They were responsible for most of the editing and connective writing. The major conclusions are: ● The capability and importance of NSG is expanding rapidly, and NSG is providing key science and knowledge to many specific scientific challenges in diverse disciplines–from ecology and anthropology to hydrology, oceanography, cryosphere science, soil and critical zone science, and more. ● This has been thanks to diverse new instruments and approaches, expanded monitoring, improved resolution, interoperable data sets, and new computing power and approaches, among other developments. ● As a result, advancing NSG is critical to addressing many societal challenges at local to global scales. Human society depends on and interacts with the NSG environment in deep and diverse ways at all scales. ● Despite these developments, integration of NSG approaches and awareness of these across related disciplines are not nearly robust enough for these needs. ● Major challenges include providing equipment and training around its use, developing and deploying new equipment and sensors, developing interoperable data, and developing computation techniques. ● In particular, educating both current researchers and developing an NSG-enabled workforce is a major challenge. ● Integrating education with societal and scientific challenges provides a great opportunity and means to expand inclusivity and diversity in the Earth sciences and to address climate justice and equity challenges. ● Thus there was a strong consensus for support of an NSG Center designed to address these challenges and needs and to foster convergent science, provide broad and hands-on educational training, and engage communities and the public meaningfully. ● We were not charged with envisioning the specific model for a Center—and indeed emphasized that the term “Center” was generic and did not necessarily imply that these efforts were envisioned to be in one location–but note that NSF is supporting important complementary facilities include the new EarthScope Consortium combining IRIS and UNAVCO, NCALM, and CTEMPS. ● In sum, we strongly encourage the NSF to take the next step in considering the best implementation model for a NSG Center that addresses these needs, enables these opportunities, and leverages and complements existing efforts.

Several bills moving through Congress are likely to provide significant funding for expanding research and results in climate change solutions (CCS). This is also a priority of the Biden-Harris Administration. The National Science Foundation (NSF) will be expected to distribute and manage much of this funding through its grant processes. Effective solutions require both a continuation and expansion of research on climate change–to understand and thus plan for potential impacts locally to globally and to continually assess solutions against a changing climate–and rapid adoption and implementation of this science with society at all levels. NSF asked AGU to convene its community to help provide guidance and recommendations for enabling significant and impactful CCS outcomes by 1 June. AGU was asked in particular to address the following: 1. Identify the biggest, more important interdisciplinary/convergent challenges in climate change that can be addressed in the next 2 to 3 years 2. Create 2-year and 3-year roadmaps to address the identified challenges. Indicate partnerships required to deliver on the promise. 3. Provide ideas on the creation of an aggressive outreach/communications plan to inform the public and decision makers on the critical importance of geoscience. 4. Identify information, training, and other resources needed to embed a culture of innovation, entrepreneurialism, and translational research in the geosciences. Given the short time frame for this report, AGU reached out to key leaders, including Council members, members of several committees, journal editors, early career scientists, and also included additional stakeholders from sectors relevant to CCS, including community leaders, planners and architects, business leaders, NGO representatives, and others. Participants were provided a form to submit ideas, and also invited to two workshops. The first was aimed at ideation around broad efforts and activities needed for impactful CCS; the second was aimed at in depth development of several broad efforts at scale. Overall, about 125 people participated; 78 responded to the survey, 82 attended the first workshop, and 28 attended the more-focused second workshop (see contributor list). This report provides a high-level summary of these inputs and recommendations, focusing on guiding principles and several ideas that received broader support at the workshops and post-workshop review. These guiding principles and ideas cover a range of activities and were viewed as having high importance for realizing impactful CCS at the scale of funding anticipated. These cover the major areas of the charge, including research and solutions, education, communication, and training. The participants and full list of ideas and suggestions are provided as an appendix. Many contributed directly to this report; the listed authors are the steering committee.

The COVID-19 pandemic affected the scientific workforce in many ways. Many worried that stay-at-home orders would disproportionately harm the productivity and well-being of women and early-career scientists, who were expected to shoulder more childcare, homeschooling, and other domestic duties while also interrupting field and lab research, essential for career advancement. AGU journal submission and author and reviewer demographic data allowed us to investigate the effect the pandemic may have had on many Earth and space scientists, especially on women and early career scientists. However, we found that submissions to AGU journals increased during the pandemic as did total submissions from women (with no difference in the proportion). Although the rate at which women agreed to review decreased slightly (down 0.5%), women still made up a larger proportion of agreed reviewers during the pandemic compared to two years earlier. Little difference was seen overall in median times to complete reviews except with women in their 40s and 70s, suggesting that they were affected more during the pandemic than other age and gender groups. Although AGU’s data do not show that the effects of the pandemic decreased the participation of women in AGU journals, the lag between research and writing/submitting may still be seen in later months. The stay-at-home orders may also have allowed people to devote time to writing up research conducted pre-pandemic; writing too can be done at down-time hours, which may have supported the increase in submissions to and reviews for AGU journals.

Researchers are challenged with preparing and complying with data management plans and open data mandates. The ocean science repository community has demonstrated the benefits of providing FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) data to its researchers through innovative alliances, robust metadata, and semantic connectivity. Challenges still exist in coordinating science policy, and research services across funders, institutions, and publishers that support the researcher’s data management needs. The convenors of this session request abstracts that focus on the value of FAIR data to the research community and the tools that support data discovery, compliance with data management plans, transparency, reproducibility, and research integrity.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has extensive journal submission and annual meeting abstract data that we can use to study effects within the Earth and space science (E&SS) community. We had provided an initial analysis based on data through June of 2020 (Wooden, 2020), and here we provide journal submission data analysis through October 2020 and analyze author team demographics of both journal submissions and our annual Fall Meeting abstracts. This most recent analysis shows: 1) Monthly journal article submissions have increased in 2020, while the proportion submitted by women have remained at 23% with monthly fluctuations of +/- 1-3 points. 2) 2020 journal article submissions from China surpassed those from the U.S. in every month except April. However, AGU Fall Meeting abstracts from China decreased 57% compared to last year. 3) Submissions from men and women in their 20s decreased while submissions from women in their 30s and 50s and men in their 40s increased. 4) Among journal articles and meeting abstracts, average author team size has increased; the proportion of mixed gender teams have increased while all-male teams have decreased. All-female teams have remained steady. 5)The age of submitting abstract authors has decreased but surprisingly with a smaller proportion of students submitting and a larger proportion of early-career researchers submitting abstracts.