Jory Lerback

and 2 more

The scientific community is becoming more demographically diverse, and team science is becoming more common. Here, we compare metrics of success in STEM, such as acceptance rates and citations, between differing team compositions regarding nationality, gender, career stage, and race/ethnicity. We collected the final decisions and citations as of 2019 of 91,427 manuscripts submitted from 2012-2018 to journals published by the American Geophysical Union. We matched the authors by email on each manuscript to self-provided demographic information within the American Geophysical Union’s membership database. This resulted in 20,940 manuscripts matched to nation, gender, and career stage, and 6,015 manuscripts matched to race/ethnicity for manuscripts whose entire authorship team was affiliated with the U.S. Among similar sized authorship teams (teams of 2-4), acceptance rates were 2.7, 4.5, and 0.9% higher (pnation < 0.01, pgender < 0.05, pcareer stage = 0.51) with more than one nation, gender, and career stage, respectively, than non-diverse authorship teams. Diverse papers had 1.2 more citations for international teams than single-nation teams (pnation < 0.01). There were 0.4 and 1.0 fewer citations for authorship teams with more than one gender or career stage than manuscripts with one gender or one career stage (pgender = 0.21, pcareer stage = 0.36). However, racially/ethnically diverse teams were associated with 5.5% lower acceptance rates (p < 0.01) and 0.8 fewer citations (p = 0.15) than racially/ethnically homogenous teams. These results show that diversity can have tangible benefits to science, but equitable practices and inclusive cultures must also be fostered.

Caitlin Bergstrom

and 7 more

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is pleased to submit this RFI response to 2021-13640 on improving federal scientific integrity policies. AGU is the largest global organization covering the Earth sciences with a mission “to support and inspire a global community of individuals and organizations interested in advancing discovery in Earth and space sciences and its benefit for humanity and the environment.” Fostering integrity is a key part of our new strategic plan and past activities and we are engaged in supporting integrity broadly, including with federal agencies. Although not a focus of these recommendations, AGU has often spoken up through position statements and letters related to scientific integrity. Several examples are listed in the references. With this perspective, we urge OSTP to consider two points that we elaborate below: • Fostering integrity–and in turn public trust in science and science policy–requires a broad, holistic view of practices that extend beyond the typical focus on transparency and ethics to include ensuring deeper public engagement, addressing diversity and inclusivity in science and supporting the backbone infrastructure that enables all of these. • The way science is supported, practiced and conducted is changing significantly, as is its dissemination and communication, and these changes have important implications for fostering integrity in the 21st century. Specifically, parts of the culture and reward system of science need improvement to align with these changes, and OSTP and federal policy can be a strong proactive force in enabling this change. This is particularly the case if these policies and practices provide leading examples and extend to federal grants. Many other organizations would then align.

R. Brooks Hanson

and 7 more

GeoHealth represents the critical intersection between the Earth and environmental sciences, and agricultural and health sciences. Following a specific request from the National Science Foundation (NSF) this report provides a series of recommendations aimed at empowering research, building fundamental workforce capacity, and improving communication around GeoHealth to the public and policy makers. This development is critical as a robust GeoHealth research enterprise is essential to global health, human and ecosystem well-being, and sustainability. The AGU community along with those from several allied societies provided the recommendations in this report; these were developed for a detailed survey and two workshops. The survey and other input revealed several broad challenges and needs, including highly siloed funding and support for researchers across institutions and societies, the inability to access or combine key datasets, and in particular the lack of clear career trajectories and support. The recommendations consist of: (i) six programmatic areas where significant attention to building a GeoHealth research enterprise is needed; (ii) approaches and concepts for four specific challenges in GeoHealth for which significant results could be enabled rapidly, within 2-3 years; (iii) ideas for developing an education/career path and for outreach; (iv) larger “moonshot” ideas that might yield very significant impacts over ca. 10 years. All of these have several common elements and themes: they leverage many directorates within NSF, including all within the GEO division; can build off of existing initiatives; are best developed through partnerships with other agencies and communities; and rely on open and FAIR data sets. Although the focus of these recommendations is toward and for the NSF, the suggestions are more general and hopefully will be considered by other funding agencies and other parts of the research enterprise in the U.S. and internationally.