How inclusive is the EGU? Editorial boards of EGU journals show a disbalance in European countries of affiliation

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The European Geoscience Union is the largest geoscience society of Europe, representing ~18000 geoscience members from across the world. The EGU engages and serves its community by providing opportunities for members to network, present their research results and exchange ideas at EGU organised conferences, workshops and in their diverse scientific journals. The EGU has also established an EDI Committee to assess the current representation of European countries within the EGU structure and initiatives that reflect and impact the geoscience community. In this context we have conducted a detailed analysis on the geographical representation of European researchers (defined by their country of affiliation) being a member in editorial boards of EGU journals.Our survey of all 19 EGU journals in 2022, revealed that out of 1176 editors currently 792 editors have an affiliation at a European country, accounting for 67%; scientists with a host institution based in North America were also highly represented (~20%). Most of the editors based in Europe are affiliated to institutions in Germany, UK, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Italy. Nordic countries (Denmark, Sweden, and Finland) as well as countries in Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal, and Greece) have a lower representation, with less than 5% of the total number of editors based in each of these European countries.21 European countries did not have a representative on any of the 19 EGU journal editorial boards. Countries that were not represented include Albania, Andorra, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, San Marino, Serbia, and Slovakia. Other countries with very limited representation included Poland, Czech Republic (3 editors), Slovenia (2 editors) and Croatia and Ukraine with one editor each. Apart from Iceland and Ireland all these severely underrepresented countries are geographically located in Eastern and Central Europe. In total their representation amounts to 1.3% of the total number of EGU journal editors based in Europe. This is extremely low, as the population of these countries represents about 29% of Europe`s population and their scientific productivity based on Scopus indexed articles published currently amounts to 11.6% of Europe`s research output in the field of Earth and Planetary sciences. Collectively, the EGU General Assembly presenters with a host institution based in the above-mentioned severely underrepresented countries represent about 8 % of the European presenters during the last 7 years. We further compared the current data with other performance indicators such as participation in EGU, EGU awards and award nominations. The share of 1.3% in editorial representation was significantly lower than that of award nominations (about 4%) and even lower than the share of EGU awards (1.7%). We will discuss possible reasons for this underrepresentation. We will also show what strategies the Publications Committee has applied so far to increase diversity in their boards and suggest other actions that could be taken to enhance the diversity in editorial boards in EGU and other journals.