The future of scientific publishing has become one of the defining questions facing modern science. Rising publication costs, increasing dependence on commercial publishing infrastructures, the rapid expansion of AI-assisted workflows, and growing concerns about research assessment have all prompted fundamental questions about who scientific publishing should ultimately serve. The EGU26 Great Debate on scientific publishing highlighted both the urgency of these discussions and the diversity of opinions across the geoscience community. Yet one important perspective remains comparatively underexplored: the collective responsibility of researchers themselves in shaping the publishing ecosystem.
While discussions on scientific publishing often focus on publishers, business models, or policy reforms, researchers themselves remain central actors in shaping the scholarly communication ecosystem. Through their choices as authors, reviewers, editors, committee members, and society members, scientists collectively determine the future of publishing.
Publishing is not an external service provided to science: it is an integral part of scientific practice. Every day, researchers make decisions as authors, reviewers, editors, hiring committee members, grant reviewers, society members, and institutional leaders. These choices influence which journals thrive, how scientific quality is assessed, what incentives early-career researchers receive, and ultimately what kind of publishing landscape future generations of researchers will inherit.
This session invites contributions exploring how researchers can actively shape scholarly communication.
We welcome contributions exploring four interconnected dimensions of scholarly communication: community governance, research quality and trust, incentives and assessment and emerging challenges. We particularly encourage contributions that document successes and failures of publishing initiatives, evaluate publishing policies, assess researcher incentives, or present evidence-based approaches for reforming scholarly communication.
The session aims to bring together researchers from all career stages, particularly early-career researchers, journal editors, publishers, librarians, funders, scientific societies, and research institutions to discuss how publishing can better support open, rigorous, equitable, and sustainable practices in geoscience.