In April 2021 the EGU Publications Committee launched the authors’ survey to learn about the authors’ publishing experience and identify how to even better serve the scientific community. Now in its second year, the evaluation of the survey results continues to reflect an overall positive experience by the authors regarding their main criteria in the publishing process.

The survey’s feedback is annually evaluated, and the results are discussed and implemented by the Publications Committee, as they continue to champion EGU’s ideals of a bottom-up approach to scientific publishing that acknowledges and serves the needs of the scientific community. The most recent evaluation of the survey results is based on more than 500 responses, representing about 11% of the articles published since April 2021.

Covering questions about the authors’ satisfaction with the publishing process and about EGU’s interactive open peer review publication model, the survey asks respondents to compare their experiences with previous publishing experiences with publications outside the EGU family of journals.

Once again, EGU’s Publications Committee were glad to see that overall, the vast majority of authors are satisfied with the publication process, with 88% percent indicating that they are likely to submit to an EGU journal again. We were interested to see that the most prominent reason why authors chose an EGU journal was the reputation of the journal, but that the core features of the EGU publication model of open access publishing, and the open peer review process, were also named in the top three attractive features. 74% of the respondents also highly valued the fairness, transparency, and constructiveness of the interactive public peer review publication process. Our fast publication times were also recognised, with 56% of authors stating that the time from submission to publication is similar to, or even shorter than for other journals.

EGU’s Publications Committee, in partnership with our publisher Copernicus, aims to understand and meet the needs of our scientific community and to continuously improve our publishing workflows while maintaining high quality, therefore, the Publications Committee would like to encourage as many authors to participate. By completing the survey sent after the final decision on a submitted manuscript and sharing their opinions, authors help us to improve the publishing experience for everyone.

“The Publications Committee is highly pleased with the outcome of this ongoing survey. It shows once more that authors see great value in our publication model of open access and open peer review. We are looking forward to an even more successful development of our publications also in view of the many opportunities the integrated repository EGUsphere offers” summarizes Barbara Ervens, Chair of the Publications Committee. “We also want to express our gratitude to the many, many reviewers, editors and executive editors for their excellent voluntary service to EGU’s journals and their support of open publishing, the impacts of which are clearly reflected in this positive feedback from our authors.”

Overall, the Publications Committee is grateful for the positive feedback from our authors and, as the survey is still ongoing, they are looking forward to continuing to receive valuable feedback from current and future authors over the next few years.