Vadose Zone Journal 2019 Summary of Editorial Reports

There has been amajor change in the Vadose Zone Journal Editorial Board, as Harry Vereecken has stepped down as Editor after his termended.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 toWiley Publishers. PammKasper, our managing editor of VZJ, our publication system managers Lauren Coleman and Abby Morrison, have tirelessly worked on making the transition smooth. Themove toWiley 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:  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: 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 F I G U R E 3 Journal Citation Report: Impact Factor and Percentile Rank. The lines indicate the percentage rank within the respective journal category. 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 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

Production
Total published pages and papers are shown for 2019, Vol. 18, to the end of September and the previous 5 yr. The number of Original Research papers submitted has been running slightly higher than previous years. We published the second part of the Nonuniform Flows across Vadose Zone Scales special section this year to complete that special section. We have already set a new record for the number of original research papers published, and both the total number of papers and the number of pages is already ahead of all years shown below except 2018, when we published eight special sections. This year we have published one review paper and one update. Wiley is scheduled to begin publishing papers in the 2020 volume starting with papers that are ready for publication after November 15.

Social Media and Promotion
The Vadose Zone Journal Twitter account (@vadosezonej) currently has 581 followers, a number that continues to increase yearly. Fourteen articles have been promoted via magazine summaries and one as a feature story in 2019, which are promoted via the Research Highlights online and social media. Special thanks to Kathleen Smits for serving as an outstanding Science Communication Editor and writing article summaries. Journal content was also promoted to the general public through our Science Communication Department as web stories. Questions regarding these stories can be directed to the Science Communication Editor or Susan Fisk, Public & Science Communication Director (sfisk@sciencesocieties.org).
Again this year, we shared the preliminary annual meeting program with the journal and book editors and editorsin-chief and encouraged them to share the information with their editorial boards so that they could contact presenters regarding potential special sections, symposiums, or book topics. We also communicated directly with meeting presenters regarding publishing with ACSESS. We already have one special section in development based on the symposium "Transdisciplinary Contributions and Opportunities in Soil Physical Hydrology" held in San Antonio in November.
Our podcast series, Field, Lab, Earth, available through iTunes, Stitcher, or direct subscription, released two episodes in 2019 based on VZJ articles. The March podcast was with Heye Bogena on the Hydrological Observatories, based on that special section. The May podcast was with Olenka Forde and Uli Mayer on subsurface gas migration based on their 2018 paper. Field, Lab, Earth has its own Twitter account (@fieldlabearth), which regularly posts content to promote each episode, including sneak peek "audiogram" videos, links to the articles featured on the show, and other relevant content. Each episode is also promoted on the society Twitter and Facebook accounts and in both its own e-newsletter and the society-wide News Flash.
This year, we bid farewell to Tracy Hmielowski, who served the Societies as CSA News-Science Editor from 2016 through mid-2019. We welcome DJ McCauley as the new CSA News-Science Editor. DJ received her M.S. in Communication this year from the University of Delaware and obtained her B.S. in biology from DeSales University. She works closely with journal SCEs and Editors to develop and write science content for CSA News magazine and post promotions to our social media accounts. If you have any questions about promoting an article in our magazines, please contact DJ at dmccauley@sciencesocieties.org or Matt Nilsson (managing editor of magazines) at mnils-son@sciencesocieties.org. For more information about our podcast, please contact Abby Morrison at amorri-son@sciencesocieties.org.

What's New?
The headquarters publications staff have been working hard this year to facilitate the transfer of the ACSESS Digital Library (DL) to the Wiley Online Library (WOL) and the details for final publication of all journals by Wiley. Initial editing will remain with our staff, but Wiley will be doing the page layout and publication. As part of the DL, each journal had its own individual identity, but in the WOL we will be among thousands of journals and have needed to develop, as much as possible, a combined identity as ACSESS journals. Much of this work will benefit editorial board members and authors as well. Standardized author instructions will make moving among our journals much easier, as will more standardized submission systems within ScholarOne. There will also be a new look for the VZJ cover to coordinate with new covers for all ACSESS journals and to help identify us as a group. Watch for it in 2020!
The journal is now listed and indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which should aid in discovery of both the journal as a whole and individual articles. To aid in communication within each editorial boards, our membership department is creating discussion boards for each journal as a society committee (VZJ is S303). This should make discussions easier than trying to keep track of email strings. It should also make it easier for the board and the headquarters staff to communicate.
Publication costs for 2020 with Wiley will remain the same as this year with the exception that there will not be an additional charge for a CC BY license. Both the CC BY and CC BY-NC-ND licenses will be available at the same Article Processing Charge of $1750. There will continue to be an excess page charge per page for pages above seven, with a discount for SSSA members.
Authors may choose between two open access licensing options: • CC BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (In summary: You may share immediately with attribution.) • CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/4.0/ (In summary: You may share immediately with attribution, but not for commercial or derivative purposes.)

Vadose Zone Journal
We continue to accept LaTeX papers on an experimental basis; currently VZJ is the only one of our journals to do so. We published five papers in 2019 that were submitted in LaTeX. We expect the system for handling LaTeX papers will become easier and less expensive under Wiley and hope to be able to open it up to other journals.

Wiley Partnership
After signing the journals and magazines agreement in May 2019 and the books agreement in June 2019, the transition of institutional subscriber information, archive information and article files began very quickly. Currently, we are on track for launch of the journals, books and magazines on January 1, 2020 on the Wiley Online Library. Transition of the online publications and archives is proceeding. A planned soft launch will be in December to allow time for quality control checks and corrections. Wiley is already managing all institutional (non-member) marketing and subscription and archive sales in the US and around the world.
The Author Profiles feature and English Abstracts of the Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering Meetings currently on the Digital Library will be discontinued at the end of the year. The Meeting Notes and Presentations will not be moving to the Wiley platform, but will become free-toread and linked via the three society web pages. The AMSA Meat & Muscle Biology Journal will be leaving ACSESS for a new publishing home before the end of the year.
For Editorial Board members, ScholarOne will retain much of the current format and structure, but with updated workflows. Also, Editorial Board members will be gaining a summary dashboard for their journal to allow site searches and individual reporting. Authors will experience minor change on the submission side with a shift to a more standard Wiley format to accommodate many of Wiley's Open Access initiatives. Corresponding authors will gain access to the Author Services online dashboard which will allow them to make payments, view proofs, and simplify journal submissions. The switchover for each journal to Wiley will be determined per journal title and will be communicated in detail by Managing Editors.

Submission and Peer Review Management Systems
The Publications team has been working towards drawing together the submission and peer review processes across all 13 of our journals to provide a more efficient and posi-tive customer experience. The team engaged in group discussions and learning opportunities to arrive at a consensus for topics such as task timelines, decision workflows, author communication and peer review reporting. Our ScholarOne submissions system portals have been upgraded to operate with greater efficiency, while becoming compatible with the Wiley publishing platform. The team has also worked to formalize Editorial Board appointments, aligning with current ASA, CSSA and SSSA committee guidelines.
These improvements will be reviewed moving forward and additional improvements may be recommended to encourage authors to return.

Annual Meeting
In January, we piloted a "Meet the Editors" event in the Society Center at the Soils Meeting in San Diego to allow researchers and authors to discuss their research and ask our Editors questions about the journals. Participation was mixed, but we are moving forward with a repeat of this event in November. In San Antonio, all Editors will gather on Sunday evening at labeled tables in the Society Center during the opening reception to take questions and feedback.
Also, at the upcoming annual meeting, Wiley staff will be on hand to meet researchers and our Editorial boards. Lauren Coleman and Abby Morrison will offer ScholarOne help sessions for Editorial Board members on Monday Nov. 11 from 7:30 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and on Tuesday, Nov. 12 from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. and we will be holding our last annual meeting book sale in the Society Center.

Downloads Summary
In 2019, the downloaded article numbers have leveled after experiencing a decline in downloaded articles from 2017 to 2018. Through September 2019, there have been over 2.225M journal article and book chapter downloads. This compares to 2.250M downloads through September 2018. Moving forward with Wiley in 2020, I expect to see the download and usage statistics rise with the exposure of our publications to additional institutions.

Editors Conference
In May, ACSESS hosted the Fourth Annual Editor's Conference in Madison, a very successful gathering of Society Editors-in-Chief, journal Editors and ACSESS Publications staff. Our keynote speakers from Wiley, Colette Bean, Steven "Otto" Ottogalli and Fiona Sarne provided in depth information on Wiley's history as a publisher along with current policies and an outlook into their strategy and vision for the future.
The committee discussed and adopted a data policy for all journal titles: "ACSESS Data Policy encourages the storage and availability of data necessary to understand and evaluate phenomena reported in our publications. Data should be stored or archived in domain repositories that are recognized widely and available to the community. Archiving should follow best management practices for metadata and data curation. Data not stored in such a repository should be available upon request to the authors. Additional guidance or requirements may be provided by individual journals." There was also lively discussion and information shared detailing recent initiatives like uniform submission standards, manuscript transfers, the English Language Editing Service, data reporting, and open access. The committee will meet again at the Annual Meeting in November to address additional topics and action items.

Impact Factors
ACSESS currently has 7 of our 13 journals receiving Impact Factors. Two ACSESS journals experienced significant gains and six out of seven ACSESS journals receiving an impact factor showed improvements for 2018. TPG showed the most significant increased by more than 38% to an Impact Factor of 4.042 while VZJ increased its Impact Factor to 3.634, an increase of more than 34%.
The Impact Factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited over a year. The Impact Factor is one tool used to evaluate a journal's relative importance when compared with other journals in the same study area.

Podcasts
Led by staff member Abby Morrison, ACSESS has released 10 new podcasts in 2019 through September and plans to release three additional episodes before the end of the year. The podcast promotes the science published in our journals through audio interviews. Since show's beginning in June 2018, there have been more than 13,300 downloads on iTunes and "listens" on Spotify. With more than 150 Twitter followers, the show highlighted the OSU hand planter, precision and sustainable agriculture and turfgrass colorants in 2019. To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the podcast, Abby published a blooper reel episode.

Books
The books program continued to draw readers and researchers to the Digital Library, with just under 209K book, TOC and chapter downloads across more 330 titles in 2019 from January through August. Hard copy book sales, through the end of August, have already generated more than $79,600 in gross sales. Of that amount, Precision Agriculture Basics has accounted for just over $12,600, almost 16% of the total, in print sales.
This year's three releases to date are Agroclimatology, Bridging Among Disciplines by Synthesizing Soil and Plant Processes and Industrial Hemp as a Modern Commodity Crop. Fall continues to be a very busy time for books, with four new books slated to debut before the end of 2019. The titles are: Animal Manure, Crops and Man, 3rd Edition, Fieldwork Ready and Guidelines for Analysis and Description of Regolith Thin Sections.

Magazines
Both CSA News and Crops & Soils magazines began a redesign of the mastheads, covers and all news and feature pages mid-year under the direction of Matt Nilsson, with assistance from the Wiley design department. The launch of the new magazine designs is planned in conjunction with the Wiley platform launch in January 2020. The designs will also debut in print in January.

Advertising
In 2019, Eric Welsh retained all responsibility for selling advertising for the magazines as well as space at the annual meeting, corporate sponsorships, online webinars and other online opportunities. With great success through the year, Eric will keep this responsibility with the Publications transition to Wiley in 2020. Even with expanded advertising opportunities available from Wiley, the Societies will continue to retain all advertising revenue.

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
On behalf of the Society, sincere thanks are extended to the Editorial Board members who are completing a term of service as of 31 Dec. 2019. Your volunteer service of time and effort has made an important and measurable impact on our journal. We greatly appreciate your support of our Society publications.
Thanks are also extended to the Guest Associate Editors of the special section Nonuniform Flows across Vadose Zone Scales: Majdi Abou Najm, Laurent Lassabatere, and Ryan Stewart. This special section is a valuable addition to the journal.