SOIL, EGU’s gold open-access journal dedicated to soil system sciences, has received its first Web of Science Impact Factor (IF) of 3.343. SOIL covers scientific studies focussed on the chemical, biological and physical aspects of the soil system, and the journal emphasises integration with other disciplines, such as hydrology, health sciences and agronomy, among others.

“This first Impact Factor clearly indicates the high quality of papers published in SOIL and a strong interest by the community to link soil system sciences to other disciplines,” says SOIL Executive Editor Johan Six. “Ultimately,” he says, “this results in the science having a broader impact for society.”

Established in 2015, SOIL has become a vital member of the portfolio of 19 peer-reviewed, open-access journals the Union publishes in partnership with Copernicus Publications, a company known for its interactive, two-stage public peer-review process. The list of SOIL’s most-downloaded articles, with topics ranging from the modeling of soil functions and case studies of soil in art to the effectiveness of landscape decontamination following the Fukushima nuclear accident, illustrates the wide variety of topics that appear in this publication.

Other EGU journals registered increases in their impact factors in the past year, including two of the Union’s top-ranked publications, Geoscientific Model Development (GMD, IF 5.240) and Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS, IF 5.153). Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP) is the highest-ranked EGU journal, with a new Impact Factor of 5.414.

A journal’s Impact Factor is calculated by dividing the number of citations its articles received in a given year (2019 in this case) by the total number of articles published during the previous two years. All but three EGU journals are now sufficiently established to have received an Impact Factor.

“These are fantastic achievements that would not have been possible without the dedicated efforts of the nearly 10,000 journal editors and reviewers who contributed generously to the process in 2019,” says Katja Fennel, chair of the EGU Publications Committee. “We are very grateful for their invaluable contributions to ensuring the high quality of EGU journal publications, and greatly appreciate their engagement in constructive dialog between authors, reviewers, editors, and the community at large during the open review process,” she says. “On behalf of the 20,000 authors and co-authors who have published articles in EGU journals,” adds Fennel, “I would also like to thank the team at Copernicus for their tireless and efficient management of these journals, and emphasise their dedication to finding innovative solutions in a rapidly changing publication landscape.”

In 2019 EGU, together with its publisher Copernicus, launched their latest scientific publication: Weather and Climate Dynamics (WCD). This journal is dedicated to research on dynamical processes in the atmosphere, including extreme weather events, links between the atmospheric water cycle and weather systems, and storm track dynamics.

“EGU launched WCD to support the important field of atmospheric dynamics, which bridges weather and climate,” says WCD Executive Editor Heini Wernli. “These fields have become increasingly separated in the last decades, so this journal will help build a bridge between these two fields and establish a seamless perspective on atmospheric flows on scales from weather to climate (minutes to decades).”

In 2019 EGU journals collectively published more than 3000 final papers that have been downloaded more than 2.5 million times. Across the complete journal portfolio, the time from submission to peer-reviewed publication averaged just 170 days.

• EGU journals