Julia C. Hargreaves

The 2021 Union Service Award is awarded to Julia C. Hargreaves in recognition of her outstanding contributions over many years to the creation, promotion, and development of the internationally recognized EGU journal Geoscientific Model Development.

In 2008 Hargreaves became a founding executive editor of EGU’s Geoscientific Model Development (GMD) and has played a critical role in the intellectual development and practical success of the journal ever since. She served as chief executive editor from 2014-2019 and continues to serve on the editorial board. Through continual refinement of the policy of the journal, in constant collaboration with the publisher Copernicus, she has pushed open publishing and open code to a new standard within the EGU. For example, the now-ubiquitous “code and data availability” sections are the result of a decade-long process of increasing transparency pioneered by GMD and developed, supported, and championed at every stage by Hargreaves.

The idea that not only scientific results from geoscientific models should be published, but also that the development and source code of those models should be reviewed, very much stems from Hargreaves. Before GMD there was no space for geoscientific models to receive the necessary level of peer-review scrutiny that delivers open, transparent science, and model developers received little to no credit for their work. Now, such a place exists with GMD, and the geosciences have hugely benefitted from this endeavour.

In recognition of the countless hours that she has devoted to GMD, for her wider influence on the evolution of open data and code publishing within the EGU and beyond, and for pushing the highest standards for code and data availability at the Union level, Julia C. Hargreaves is awarded the 2021 Union Service Award.