Editor's Report | Markus Flury

Journal Update

There has been a major change in the Vadose Zone Journal Editorial Board, as Harry Vereecken has stepped down as Editor after his term ended. Markus Flury has taken over as Editor, and Jan Vanderborght has taken over the Co‐Editor position vacated by Markus Flury.

Vadose Zone Journal has been under the open access model since January 2018, and we have now been under open access for the 2nd year. This means that all papers published in VZJ are immediately accessible to a global readership, which helps to enhance visibility and impact beyond the vadose and critical zone research community. As the open access is associated with an increased cost for the authors, there was concern that submissions to VZJ would decrease. This has so far not been proven true, at least not for the original research papers submitted. Indeed, the number of original research papers has increased (Figure 1). What has decreased, however, are the number of papers submitted in Special Sections (Figure 1). Soliciting for Special Sections has shown to be more difficult under the open access model, because authors have to pay more for their articles, and guest editors are more reluctant to take on the job of organizing a Special Section.

Vadose Zone Journal has been preparing for the transition to Wiley Publishers. Pamm Kasper, our managing editor of VZJ, our publication system managers Lauren Coleman and Abby Morrison, have tirelessly worked on making the transition smooth. The move to Wiley will occur on January 1, 2020. We expect an improvement in manuscript handling and marketing for our papers and journal.

In 2019, VZJ published one Special Section on ‘‘Nonuniform Flow Across Vadose Zone Scales’’, guest edited by Majdi Abou Najm, Laurent Lassabatere, and Ryan Stewart. This Special Section consists of 17 papers, and is split over the 2018/2019 publication years. I expect this Special Section to be very successful. I thank the guest editors for initiating, promoting, and organizing the review process. The planned Special Section on ‘‘New Perspectives on Soil Models’’ unfortunately did not get contributions and had to be cancelled.

A new Special Section on ‘‘Transdisciplinary Contributions and Opportunities in Soil Physical Hydrology’’ with guest editors Ole Wendroth, Scott Bradford, and Thomas Harter is in the planning phase and will kick off at the SSSA Annual Meeting in San Antonio with a symposium of the same name. This Special Section will be a tribute to the achievements of Jan Hopmans, a former Editor of VZJ and promoter of transdisciplinary research. A Special Section on ‘‘Emerging Contaminants in the Vadose Zone’’ is planned from a symposium at EGU 2020 in Vienna.

In 2019, VZJ published one update paper and one review:

• Hans‐J¨org Vogel: Scale Issues in Soil Hydrology
• Harry Vereecken et al.: Infiltration from the Pedon to Global Grid Scales: An Overview and Outlook for Land Surface Modeling

These two articles are likely to become highly cited. Several more update papers are in progress:

• Alex Thurmann: Geophysical Methods
• Ute Wollschlaeger: Electrical Methods
• Wolfgang Durner: Soil Water Retention
• Dani Or, Michael Young, Harry Vereecken: Global Soils

As editor of VZJ, I also would like to thank the editorial board of VZJ. VZJ would not be that successful without their relentless support and commitment. Our co‐editors Insa Neuweiler, Venkat Lakshmi, and Jan Vanderborght did a great job in handling manuscripts and assuring a high quality review process. Kate Smits as promotion editor and Manoj Shukla as book review editor did an incredible job promoting VZJ and increasing its visibility. Many of our articles that were promoted received large attention in the social media and had high download rates. One of our articles has made it as feature article into CSA News; an example is shown in (Figure 2). Several articles were highlighted in CSA News. Special thanks to Kate Smits for constantly looking out for suitable articles to promote and writing article summaries. And also special thanks to Manoj Shukla for keeping his eye on new books published and finding suitable reviewers. Two book reviews were published:

• Garrison Sposito: Review of Properties and Management of Soils in the Tropics by Pedro Sanchez
• Pradip Adhikari: Review of Soil and Water Resource Protection in the Changing Environment by Zlatic and Kostadinov

The team of associate editors has been outstanding in handling manuscript reviews. I thank all the associate editors for their efforts and commitment to VZJ. I also thank the editorial team in Madison, Pamm Kasper, Lauren Van Driel, and Abby Morrison for their relentless support of the publication process. Without their continuous hard work, the review and publication process would not proceed as smoothly as it does. A special thank you also to our consulting editors Harry Vereecken and Michael Young who have provided invaluable input during our quarterly board meetings.

Finally, a special thank you to Harry Vereecken, the outgoing Editor, who has been an exemplary leader of VZJ in the past few years and who has elevated the status of the journal with the solicitation of excellent review, update papers, and Special Sections.

Metrics

In 2019, VZJ has reached the highest impact factor in the journals history. The current impact factor on Journal Citation Report is IF = 3.634 (Figure 3). VZJ ranking in the Journal Citation Report is as follows: ”Environmental Sciences”: 1st quartile, rank #69; ”Soil Sciences”: 1st quartile, rank #7; ”Water Resources”: 1st quartile, rank #11. This high impact factor and ranking is mainly due to a few highly‐cited papers: the most cited papers were cited 63 times (2 papers), 39, and 25 times (Figure 4). All the top cited papers were reviews or updates. The distribution of citations is highly skewed, with the majority of papers receiving 0 or 1 citation (Figure 5). I do expect the impact factor to remain high in the coming year, as we will have some papers with high citations, from update and review papers and the Special Sections on ‘‘Hydrological Observatories’’, ‘‘Isotope Approaches in Vadose Zone Research’’, and ‘‘Nonuniform Flow Across Vadose Zone Scales’’.

VZJ currently has 5 highly‐cited papers in Web of Science:

• Zacharias et al., 2011. A Network of Terrestrial Environmental Observatories in Germany
• Simunek et al., 2016. Recent Developments and Applications of the HYDRUS Computer Software
• Vereecken et al., 2016. Modeling Soil Processes: Review, Key Challenges, and New Perspectives
• Walvoord and Kurylyk. 2016. Hydrologic Impacts of Thawing Permafrost‐A Review
• Mohanty et al., 2017. Soil Moisture Remote Sensing: State‐of‐the‐Science

Figure 6 shows the impact factors of the Tri‐Society journals. VZJ ranks prominently among the Tri‐Society journals. The acceptance rate of manuscripts in VZJ in 2019 was 68.6%, a little higher than in 2018, where the rate was 63.3% (Figure 7). Average time for the first decision is 38.8 days and average time to final decision is 81.8 days (Figure 7). The long time for first decision is due to the often encountered difficulty of finding adequate reviewers for our papers.

The distribution between US and international submission remained, fairly constant, with around 77.8% of international submissions. Most submissions are, in order of frequency, from China, the US, Germany and Canada (Figure 8).

The numbers of original research papers published in 2019 has increased compared to the previous years (Figure 9). 2018 was an anomaly in number of papers published because of the large number of Special Sections published that year. As Special Sections are usually highly successful, we will need to keep our efforts up to solicit high‐quality Special Sections. The number of review and update papers remains low, and we need to solicit actively for such papers. The number of up‐front rejections in 2019 (13.6%) increased slightly compared to 2018 (10.2%), and increased considerably compared to the years prior to 2018 (Figure 9). The Co‐Editors and I are screening papers before we send them out for review to ensure that we are using AEs and reviewers time efficiently. Papers we fell will not make it through the review process, are up‐front rejected. We provide the authors with a thorough explanation why we have rejected their paper upfront.

Editorial Board Update

We thank the team of AEs for their efforts and commitment during the past few years. The AE play a key role for the success of the journal, and their network of connections to reviewers is essential for ensuring a rapid and high‐quality review process. A special thank you to the outgoing AEs: Lis Wollesen de Jonge, Timothy Green, Mathieux Javaux, Xinhua Peng, Robert Schwartz, Jirka Simunek, and Majken Zibar. All of them have served several terms as AE and their efforts are very much appreciated.

We welcome the incoming group of AEs: Yonggen Zhang, Hailong He, Sarah Garre, Kevin Mumford, Thorsten Knappenberger Majdi Abdou Najm, Tjalfe Poulsen, Fred Zhang, Kenton Rod, Vilim Filipovic, Kunio Watanabe, Bingcheng Si, Kathleen Lohse, and Josh Heitman. These new AEs bring essential and critical expertise to VZJ.

We congratulate the 2018 recipients of the Excellence of Associate Editor Award (Olivier Bour, Peter Lehmann, Jianying Shang, Kate Smits) and the Excellence in Review Award (Brian Ebel, Prabhakar Sharma, Emilia Urbanek, Yunqiang Wang).

Very unfortunate, our long‐term Associate Editor Henry Lin passed away in September 2019 after fighting with lung cancer. Henry Lin has been AE for VZJ for the past 9 years (3 terms) and has made invaluable contributions to the journal, not only as AE but also as guest editor to Special Sections and as reviewer. Henry has also been elected as Soil Physics & Hydrology Division Chair‐Elect and would have taken over as Division Chair in 2020. Henry was internationally recognized for his visionary leadership and involvement in establishing the global network of Critical Zone Observatories (CZOs) and his research on preferential flow and hydropedology.

Board Meetings, Promotion and Improvement to VZJ

The Editor, Co‐Editor, Consulting Editors, Science Communications Editor, and Book Review Editor, and the managing staff headquarters hold quarterly meetings to discuss VZJ promotion and improvements of the review process. Full editorial board meetings and dinners were (will be) held at the European Geosciences Union meeting (April, Vienna, Austria); the Soil Science Society of America annual meeting (November, San Antonio, Texas); and the American Geophysical Union fall meeting (December, San Francisco, California).