Sue Trumbore embodies the characteristics of the Kaula award, i.e., the “unselfish service to the scientific community through extraordinary dedication to, and exceptional efforts on behalf of AGU’s publications program” extraordinarily well, serving as a true role model for the community. She has served for 4 years as the chief editor for Global Biogeochemical Cycles (GBC) and then in 2019 became the founding editor in chief of AGU’s flagship journal AGU Advances. Sue has advanced these journals immensely during her tenure.

First, she pulled GBC out of a doldrum, reorganized its editorial handling through a reorganization and expansion of the editorial board, and through these measures made it again the journal of choice for anybody interested in biogeochemistry. Second, she brought AGU Advances to life, set the vision, built a strong and diverse team of editors, and has been the driving engine of the journal ever since. Convincing authors to submit high-impact papers to a new and relatively unknown journal rather than existing prestige journals was a herculean task. Yet Sue rose to that challenge, attracting top articles to AGU Advances without negatively impacting submissions to other AGU journals. In fact, she very effectively used AGU’s journal network and worked closely together with AGU’s other editors in order to channel papers that were submitted to AGU Advances and deemed to be of high quality but not a good fit onward to the other journals. Thus, there is no doubt that the establishment and success of AGU Advances are due to Sue’s guidance, vision, and day-to-day engagement.

On top of this, Sue has been a powerful advocate of diversity, building a diverse group of editors and mentoring and nurturing them with great dedication. Many of the associate editors that Sue recruited throughout her years at GBC and AGU Advances continue to serve as editors for the different AGU journals, creating a long-living legacy of Sue’s dedication to the community. This commitment to the journals while building and caring for a diverse team of editors makes Sue an utmost deserving candidate for this year’s William Kaula Award.

— Nicolas Gruber,
ETH Zurich
Zurich, Switzerland

I am honored to be recognized with the William Kaula Award, especially when there are so many dedicated and deserving people working hard to ensure the very high standards for science published in AGU journals. Many thanks to my nominators, Nikki Gruber, Eileen Hoffman, Katsumi Matsumoto, Mary-Elena Carr and Sara Mickaloff Fletcher. While I have had the privilege to serve as editor-in-chief of two great AGU journals, I want to use this space to say a few words about AGU Advances. The idea behind Advances is to give Earth and space scientists an open access journal within our community to publish research and commentary that is of broad and immediate impact. I agreed to take on the job of founding editor-in-chief partly because I was tired of seeing so many AGU authors send their highest-profile work to journals outside of our community. At Advances, we distinguish ourselves from other highly selective journals by allowing space for authors to explain the context of their findings and describe important details of methodology. Editors highlight how each paper we publish advances our science, and we often solicit viewpoints to help put the research in broader context. We make the review process transparent by publishing the paper’s history along with the accepted version. I am particularly proud of pieces we have published on how we do our science, including commentaries on how the increasing demands to wrangle big data are affecting students, and the ongoing editorial series highlighting issues around diversity, inclusivity and ethics in the geosciences. For the success of the journal to date, I thank the Advances editorial board and Margaret Moerchen at AGU for shaping our journal. We have benefitted from the cooperative spirit of AGU’s journal editors and the support from AGU Publications staff and the Wiley team, most of whom spent the last years working from home. Finally, thanks to the authors who took the risk to submit their papers to a journal that at the time had no impact factor. While the peer review system is not perfect, it is still the best tool we have to ensure the quality and trustworthiness of the science we publish. I am glad that the William Kaula Award exists to recognize the important contributions of those who support AGU publications and honored to be this year's recipient. — Susan Trumbore Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry  Jena, GermanyUniversity of California, IrvineIrvine, California