In May 2024, AGU Publications — the scholarly-publishing arm of the American Geophysical Union, which operates 24 peer-reviewed journals across the Earth and space sciences — began enforcing an update to its authorship policy aimed squarely at “parachute science”: research conducted in a lower-resourced country or region by outside investigators who leave local scientists off the author list entirely. The update, approved by AGU Council in December 2023 and branded internally as the “Inclusion in Global Research” policy, is one of the more concrete, portfolio-wide operational responses any major publisher has made to a problem that had mostly lived in editorials and codes of conduct until now. For research administrators managing international collaborations, and for corresponding authors assembling author lists on cross-border fieldwork, the specifics of what actually changed are worth understanding in detail — not just as a restatement of the general equity themes already well covered elsewhere on this site.
What the policy actually requires
The update is an extension of AGU Publications’ existing authorship criteria, not a parallel or competing standard. Authors submitting to any of AGU’s 24 journals are now expected to disclose whether researchers based in the country or region where the fieldwork took place contributed to the study, and — where that local contribution meets AGU’s authorship criteria — to include those researchers as named co-authors rather than relegating them to the Acknowledgements section. Where full authorship criteria are not met, AGU still expects explicit, named acknowledgement of the local collaboration.
Editors are empowered to request this disclosure directly during peer review, not only to rely on authors volunteering it. Authors are also encouraged — though not strictly mandated — to include a short “Inclusion in Global Research” statement in the manuscript addressing the ethical and scientific considerations of the collaboration: how local partners were involved in study design, fieldwork, and interpretation, and why the resulting author list looks the way it does. The policy explicitly points authors to the TRUST Code — the Global Code of Conduct for Equitable Research Partnerships — as a reference framework for what an equitable collaboration looks like in practice.
The pilot behind the rollout
AGU did not implement this cold across its full journal portfolio. The policy followed an 18-month pilot in a single title, JGR: Biogeosciences, under then-Editor-in-Chief Maggie Xenopoulos. That pilot is also the source of the baseline numbers AGU cited to justify the change: an analysis of published Earth-science research conducted in Africa found that only around a quarter of those articles included an African co-author, and that only about 30% of JGR: Biogeosciences abstracts describing research in a Research4Life-eligible country included an author based in that country. According to AGU’s own account of the pilot, reported alongside the policy’s launch, the disclosure requirement measurably increased both the addition of local co-authors and the completeness of acknowledgement of local partnerships, with author response described as broadly supportive rather than resistant.
That pilot-then-scale approach is itself notable for research-administration purposes: it gives AGU (and anyone evaluating whether to adopt a similar policy at another publisher or funder) an actual before/after data point, rather than a policy justified purely on principle. It is also the detail most likely to get lost in broader equity-in-authorship coverage — the policy is not just a disclosure requirement, it is a disclosure requirement AGU can point to as having changed author-list composition during its own pilot.
Why AGU moved on this in 2024
AGU frames the update as one piece of its broader Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan, and situates it explicitly alongside similar policies already in force at other publishers — Nature and PLOS journals are the two AGU cites most directly as precedent. CASRAI’s own summary of parachute science and helicopter research places the update in that same lineage of publisher-level authorship policy rather than treating it as a novel invention. What distinguishes AGU’s version is less the underlying principle — local contributors who meet authorship criteria should be named as authors — and more that it is scoped uniformly across an entire multi-journal portfolio at once, backed by pilot data, and tied to a named external framework (the TRUST Code) rather than left as a general expectation for editors to interpret journal by journal.
AGU officials quoted in the policy’s public rollout — including Billy Williams, AGU’s Executive Vice President for Ethics, Diversity, and Inclusion, and Mia Ricci, AGU’s Director of Publications Operations — framed the change as addressing a credit and transparency problem simultaneously: researchers who contribute meaningfully to fieldwork in their own country losing out on the authorship credit that CRediT and standard authorship criteria say they are owed, and readers losing the ability to assess who was actually involved in producing the science.
What this means for research administrators
For institutions and administrators supporting investigators who publish in AGU journals, or in journals likely to follow a similar model, a few operational points follow directly from the policy text:
- Disclosure is now a submission-stage question, not a peer-review afterthought. Author-list decisions on international fieldwork projects should be documented and justified against authorship criteria before submission, not reconstructed under editor pressure after a reviewer flags a missing local co-author.
- The acknowledgement fallback still requires specificity. “Local support was provided” is not the same as a named acknowledgement of a specific collaborator’s specific contribution — the policy’s intent is defeated if the acknowledgement is as vague as the omission it replaces.
- This is a natural companion to CRediT reporting. Institutions that already require a CRediT contributor-role statement as part of internal authorship sign-off have most of the documentation this policy asks for already; the gap is usually not identifying who contributed, but whether the local contributor was invited onto the author list at all.
- It intersects with funder foreign-collaboration disclosure, not just journal policy. Institutions managing NIH-funded international fieldwork should note this sits alongside, not instead of, foreign-component disclosure obligations that a foreign co-author or affiliation can independently trigger.
How this compares to other publisher-level responses
AGU’s policy is one of several distinct publisher responses to the same underlying problem, and they are not identical in mechanism. PLOS Medicine’s approach centers on a structured questionnaire authors complete addressing local co-authorship, data sharing, and community benefit. eLife’s author-policy language asks authors of field-based studies to describe, in narrative form, what role local researchers played and how the collaboration was structured. AGU’s version is closer to a hard authorship-criteria disclosure with an explicit acknowledgement fallback, anchored to the TRUST Code rather than to a bespoke in-house framework. Readers looking for the general landscape of these policies, including precedents like the Cape Town Statement, are better served by this site’s dedicated parachute science and helicopter research guide; this piece exists specifically to go deeper on what AGU itself committed to, on what evidence, and on what timeline.
Frequently asked questions
Does AGU’s policy require local co-authors, or just disclosure of their absence?
Neither, strictly. It requires disclosure either way: if a local collaborator meets AGU’s authorship criteria, they should be named as a co-author; if they contributed but do not meet full authorship criteria, they should be named in the Acknowledgements. What it does not permit, in intent if not in enforceable mechanism, is silence — a collaboration with no disclosed local involvement at all is what the policy targets.
Which AGU journals does this apply to?
All of AGU Publications’ journals — the policy was rolled out portfolio-wide in May 2024 following the pilot in JGR: Biogeosciences, rather than being adopted title by title.
Is the “Inclusion in Global Research” statement mandatory?
AGU encourages it and editors may request it, but the core, harder requirement is the co-authorship-or-acknowledgement disclosure itself; the narrative statement is the mechanism for authors to explain and justify that disclosure.
How does this relate to CRediT?
They answer related but different questions. CRediT’s contributor-role taxonomy records what each person did; AGU’s policy governs who gets to be an author (or acknowledged contributor) at all when the work involved a local research setting. A project can have a complete CRediT statement and still fail AGU’s disclosure requirement if a local collaborator who met authorship criteria was never added to the byline.
This piece focuses specifically on the mechanics, pilot data, and stated rationale behind AGU’s 2024 policy update. For the broader definition of parachute science and how other publishers have responded, see CASRAI’s parachute science guide; for authorship equity issues unrelated to geography, such as the persistent gender gap in senior and corresponding authorship, see CASRAI’s coverage of 2025 bibliometric studies on gender and authorship.
