Taking steps to address inequities in open‐access publishing through an early career publication honor

Access to resources—whether human, financial, or social—is a key indicator of research output and, in turn, academic career progression. However, resources are not equally distributed among scientists and disparities often stem from external factors. This reality is particularly impactful for early career researchers (ECRs) who have limited control over the resources available to them to advance their careers. The resources needed to fund open-access (OA) publishing are a well-known source of academic inequity (Ross-Hellauer 2022). Despite this, wide support for OA publishing exists across the scientific community, largely because OA articles increase access to the scientific literature by removing costly paywalls (Piwowar et al. 2018). Benefits of OA publishing also exist for individual researchers; OA studies are read and cited more, so much so that an “open access citation advantage” has been described (McCabe and Snyder 2014). Depending on the methods and journals studied, this advantage ranges from an 8 to 40% increase in citation rate (Piwowar et al. 2018). The OA publishing model is set to expand further, with influential groups seeking to mandate OA publishing (e.g., Plan S; Else 2021) including recent guidance from the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (The White House 2022). However, OA publishing remains expensive, often prohibitively so, and OA fees deter ECRs broadly (Sarabipour et al. 2019), and particularly those from the Global South (Kwon 2022; Santidrián Tomillo et al. 2022). In an effort to increase access to OA publishing among ECRs, and particularly those from the Global South, we established the Limnology & Oceanography Letters Early Career Publication Honor. The goal of the honor is to provide OA fee waivers for selected ECR-led publications based on the need and potential impact of the research. The honor stems from a unique opportunity that highlights the value of bringing multiple perspectives to the editorial table. It was developed as part of the Raelyn Cole Editorial Fellowship (RCEF), a program established in 2017 by founding Editor-in-Chief of Limnology & Oceanography Letters, Dr. Patricia Soranno, to better integrate ECRs into publishing (see overview by Deemer et al. 2021). As part of the program, fellows are invited to an annual strategy day with Wiley, the publishers of Limnology & Oceanography Letters, and editors of other journals published by the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO). At this event in 2019, attendees were tasked with brainstorming ways to better support ECRs in publishing and bolster ASLO's journal portfolio. Through discussions with Dr. Jim Cloern—the Editor-in-Chief of Limnology and Oceanography Letters—we conceived the idea for an ECR publication honor that would waive OA fees for ECR-led studies. We then worked with Dr. Cloern, ASLO leadership, and Wiley to bring the publication honor from idea to implementation. Like the RCEF program it was founded within, the publication honor is a unique initiative among academic journals (Deemer et al. 2021). In the inaugural solicitation for the Honor, we invited ECRs—defined as graduate students or researchers within 3 years of completing their PhD—to submit brief applications that described their study design, its novelty and relevance to the journal, their lived experiences relating to representation in science, and their access to funding for OA publishing. We received 71 applications from 19 countries. To objectively select honorees from a deep pool of applicants, we scored each application according to the areas emphasized in our solicitation. In this Virtual Issue of Limnology & Oceanography Letters, we celebrate the publication of seven studies led by the first cohort of ECR honorees. Our honorees represent seven institutions in three countries (United States, Australia, and Italy) and their studies span broad aquatic science disciplines including biogeochemistry, species distribution modeling, microbial ecology, organismal physiology, and impacts of sea-level rise. The articles report cutting-edge research and illustrate the valuable role ECRs play in advancing these disciplines. Among selections, a common theme was quantifying and predicting climate change effects on marine and coastal ecosystems. Champion and Coleman (2021) integrated seascape topography into predictions of fish distributions under climate change. They found that predicted poleward extensions of species' ranges are reduced by as much as 60% when topography is considered, highlighting the need for incorporating static topography into predictions of future species' distributions. In another marine-focused study, Unzueta-Martínez et al. (2021) sampled oyster microbial communities to test host-associated microbial stability under rising levels of atmospheric CO2 and ocean acidification. They reported that some taxa within the oyster microbiome responded directly to ocean acidification, while others were more sensitive to host response, thereby identifying which members of the microbiome may contribute to the health and resistance of their host and which are most vulnerable to acidification. McKenzie et al. (2021) asked how ongoing sea-level rise (SLR) will impact coastal infrastructure. Using geochemical tracers and tracking of organic contaminants, their study provides some of the first empirical evidence for coastal wastewater infrastructure being compromised by SLR-driven groundwater inundation—flooding that occurs when the water table is elevated—highlighting water quality and human health impacts associated with SLR. Biogeochemical fluxes, and in some instances, their impacts on organismal physiology, was another theme of the selected studies. Heal et al. (2022) shed new light on how marine microbial communities interact with and accumulate arsenic, a potentially toxic element. They showed that in the open ocean surface waters, much of the bulk particulate arsenic is actually contained in complex lipids, some of which appear to be of bacterial origin. This represents an important advance in our understanding of marine arsenic biogeochemistry. Through microscopic and chemical analyses of sinking particles, Michaud et al. (2022) linked the ocean surface to its abyssal depths to understand the origins of large, heretofore unexplained, episodic pulses of organic carbon (OC). By quantifying phytoplankton presence and biomineral composition, their measurements suggested that these high-flux events stem from the transport of coastal diatom blooms that have been greatly transformed by pelagic food webs en route to the deep ocean, thus improving our understanding of high OC flux events. In an agricultural setting, Benelli and Bartoli (2021) used a microcosm experiment to show how plants and animals influence the release of the greenhouse gas methane from canal sediments. Methane release was 97% lower when plants and oligochaetes were present, highlighting the value of maintaining biodiversity in artificial irrigation networks. Andrew et al. (2022) clarified the physiological effects of iron and light limitation on Southern Ocean phytoplankton communities. They found variation in responses to iron and light limitation for a range of phytoplankton with one species in particular—Proboscia inermis—dedicating a much greater amount of resources into Rubisco, a key carbon-fixing enzyme, than all other Antarctic phytoplankton included. They suggest that this response represents a divergent molecular strategy that allows this species to dedicate important resources to diffusive carbon uptake rather than relying solely on active carbon uptake. The diversity and potential impact of articles in this Virtual Issue highlight the important contributions that ECRs are making to limnology and oceanography. For ASLO and Wiley, this publication honor is already considered a success and resources have been committed to waive six ECR publications each year for the next two years. Still, there are further opportunities to address inequities. We see a particular need for expanding support for scientists from the Global South where research and publishing are often underfunded. The first round of the honor attracted a geographically diverse applicant pool including 18 applicants from the Global South, despite no dedicated effort to advertise to diverse networks. A second solicitation that explicitly prioritized and advertised to applicants from the Global South and Ukraine recently closed. Publishers, including Wiley, are also developing programs that support OA publishing for underfunded countries. For example, the Research4Life program (https://www.research4life.org/) provides waivers and discounts to scientists affiliated with institutions in low to lower-middle income countries. While a good start, these waivers and discounts are likely still insufficient for overcoming the financial burdens facing the authors they target (Mekonnen et al. 2022). Furthermore, to realize a more equitable publishing landscape, support for authors from the Global South and other resource-limited positions cannot be merely financial. For example, access to international research networks and audiences through programs such as ASLO's Amplifying Voices seminar series can help reduce disparities (Meinikmann et al. 2022). To this end, the publishing honor includes an optional round of friendly peer review between members of the selection committee and honorees. This added nonfinancial benefit serves two functions: (1) the honorees get editorial feedback before submission to increase the likelihood of their study being accepted for publication, and (2) it provides a networking opportunity that is often interdisciplinary and international. Access to OA publishing is clearly important to ECRs, with roughly 10 times more applications received than honors available during the first call. Equity in publishing will advance when the scientific community, societies, and publishers collaborate to build programs that increase ECR access to OA publishing. This goal can be accomplished, for instance, by the creation of similar publication-support programs through more journals, societies, or institutions. Additionally, on the publisher side, dedicated OA fee waivers or discounts could be set aside to support ECR work. Ultimately, each entity taking action within their purview can help level the playing field of OA publishing while also being mindful of how differential access to resources can impact careers, particularly for ECRs. We would like to thank Jim Cloern, Adrienne Sponberg, ASLO, the ASLO Publications Committee, Fiona Sarne, and the Wiley editorial team for assisting with creation and administration of the publication honor as well as production of this Virtual Issue. We also acknowledge Dale Cole and family, who generously support the Raelyn Cole Editorial Fellowship under which this honor was developed. We are also grateful to the many editors and peer reviewers who reviewed the manuscripts included in this Virtual Issue. Finally, we appreciate discussions with current Raelyn Cole Editorial Fellows, Rosie Gradoville and Rita Melo Franco-Santos, regarding the future of the publication honor. Any use of trade, product, or firm names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the US Government.