1 EDITOR'S REPORT | MARKUS FLURY

Virtual Board Meeting: Thursday, November 5th, 9:00 AM central, Microsoft Teams

1.1 Journal update

Vadose Zone Journal has been under the open access model now for the 3rd year. 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. The cost for publishing an article in VZJ consists of the article processing charge (APC) of $1750 plus excess page charges for pages over 7 of $100/page for SSSA members and $200/page for nonmembers. As of January 1, 2021, the APC will increase to $1800. While the APC is modest and compare favorably with other open access fees from other hydrology journals, the page charge can add up considerably for longer articles.

The number of submitted original research papers has decreased in 2020 (Figure 1). Total submission until Sept. 30 was 108 in 2019 and 104 in 2020. This decrease may be explained by the COVID pandemic. We also noticed that authors often ask for extension of revision deadlines due to the pandemic.

Vadose Zone Journal, like all other journal from ASA, CSSA, and SSSA, is now published in partnership with Wiley. The editorial office in Madison sill manages the review process and the copyediting, Wiley is responsible for the other production processes. With the partnership with Wiley, some of the publishing procedures have changed. The most impactful is that Wiley will only push articles to Web of Science at the closure of an issue, but because VZJ after the change to open access has only one issue per year, our articles in 2020 were not pushed to Web of Science until the issues of 2020 closed. We will therefore reinstitute issues again in 2021, with 6 issues published per year. This will ensure that VZJ articles are listed timely in Web of Science. Nonetheless, the missing presence in Web of Science of our 2020 articles in the year 2020 likely will hurt our impact factor in 2021.

In 2020, VZJ published two Special Sections on “Transdisciplinary Contributions and Opportunities in Soil Physical Hydrology,‘’ guest-edited by Ole Wendroth, Scott Bradford, and Thomas Harter, and “Agrogeophysics: Geophysics to investigate soil–plant–atmosphere interactions & support agricultural management,” guest-edited by Sarah Garré, David Hyndman, Benjamin Mary, and Ulrike Werban. Both special sections have been very successful, and will make a great contribution to VZJ. I thank the guest editors for initiating, promoting, and managing the review process of these special sections. A new Special Section on “Emerging Contaminants in the Vadose Zone” is planned from a symposium at EGU 2021 in Vienna. In 2020, two update papers, three reviews, and one book review were submitted.

Starting in September 2020, VZJ along with the other journals from ASA, CSSA, and SSSA, will introduce the CRediT system to describe authors contribution to their articles. In addition, starting in 2021, the name of the corresponding Associate Editor of each published article will be listed in all ASA, CSSA, and SSSA journals.

1.2 Promotions, news presence, social media

Kate Smits, our Science Communications Editor, and D.J. McCauley from CSA News, have done a fantastic job in promoting selected articles for short highlights and extensive feature articles in CSA News and social media outlets. Two articles and a special section were promoted as feature articles into CSA News (Figure 2).

A novelty in 2020 are the addition of video abstracts to selected articles. A special thank you to Naftali Lazarovitch for initiating these video abstracts and managing and editing them. Video abstracts are short video taped presentations by the authors of a paper, providing the highlights of their findings. Naftali managed 13 video abstracts, and these are available on YouTube and also posted together with the VZJ paper on the VZJ website (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRnD8HbgKpc, http://www.com/watch?v=Ph8e-7WYbxI, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2s-FAadUEg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_LOCcSBDDg).

New in 2020 is also the institution of an outstanding paper award. This award will recognize the best paper published in the previous 2 years. The Editor and up to 5 Co-Editors and Associate Editors will select the outstanding paper based on a series of criteria from the top 10 most cited/most read papers. The Outstanding Paper Award will be presented at the Annual Meeting Publications Reception. The awardees will receive a framed certificate for the main author, and unframed certificates for additional authors. The 2020 outstanding paper is by Sprenger et al., Measuring and Modeling Stable Isotopes of Mobile and Bulk Soil Water (https://doi.org/10.2136/vzj2017.08.0149).

1.3 Metrics

In 2019, the VZJ impact factor is 2.504, dropping from last years impact factor of 3.634 (Figure 3). The drop of the impact factor is due to several highly-cited review papers published in 2016, which fell out of the impact factor calculation. The top papers contributing to the impact factor are shown in Figure 4. All these top cited papers were reviews or updates. The distribution of overall citations is highly skewed, with the majority of papers receiving 1 to 3 citations (Figure 5).

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 2020 was 63.5%, a little lower than in 2019, where the rate was 68.6% (Figure 7). Average time for the first decision is 51 days and average time to final decision is 105 days (Figure 7). The long time for first decision is due to the often encountered difficulty of finding adequate reviewers for our papers and slow reviewer response time.

The distribution between US and international submission remained, fairly constant, with around 75% of international submissions. Most submissions are, in order, from the US, China, Germany, and Canada (Figure 8).

The number of original research papers published in 2019 has decreased slightly compared to the previous years (Figure 9). The number of review and update papers remains low, and we need to solicit actively for such papers.

1.4 Editorial board update

I thank all the associate editors for their efforts and commitment to VZJ. The AEs 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. Thank you also to the editorial team at the headquarters in Madison, Kaitlin Miller, Abby Morrison, Lauren Van Driel, and Matt Wascavage 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, and to Kate Smits and Manoj Shukla for their outstanding work as science communications and book review editors.

I also would like to thank our co-editors Insa Neuweiler, Venkat Lakshmi, and Jan Vanderborght, who did a great job in handling manuscripts and assuring a high quality review process.

Changes in the editorial team for 2021 include the following: Insa Neuweiler is retiring as co-Editor after serving for two terms as co-Editor and several terms as associate Editor. Insa Neuweiler will remain on the editorial board as consulting editor. Michael Young is retiring as consulting editor after serving in the capacity for several terms. Kate Smits will take over as co-Editor from Insa Neuweiler, and Yusong Li will become the new science communications editor.

A special thank you to the outgoing AEs: Olivier Bour, Peter Lehmann, Budiman Minasny, Maria Dragila, and Kate Smits. All of them have served several terms as AE and their efforts are very much appreciated. The following AEs have completed their term in 2020 and have agreed to continue another term: Andrew Binley, Todd Caldwell, Karsten Jensen, Scott Jones, Naftali Lazarovitch, Helen Dahlke, Behzad Ghanbarian, and Clare Robinson.

We welcome the incoming group of AEs: Christoph Darnault, Jianying Shang, Steffen Schlueter, Guanglong Feng, Emmanuel Arthur, Eva Kroener, Nima Shokri, and Indra S. Sen. These new AEs bring essential and critical expertise to VZJ.

We congratulate the 2019 recipients of the Excellence of Associate Editor Award (Naftali Lazarovitch, Majdi Najm, Ute Wollschläger) and the Excellence in Review Award (Andrew Binley, Qiuping Fu, Gerard Heuvelink, Harry Schomberg).

1.5 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. A full editorial board meeting was held virtually at the annual SSSA meeting, but the meetings and dinners at EGU and AGU were cancelled due to COVID-019.