Speaker
Description
One of the goals of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Journals is to advance Earth and Space sciences. For this reason, having a data availability statement in AGU journals has evolved since 1993 and became a mandatory stand-alone section of any AGU manuscript by 2019. The data availability statement requires all authors to cite and make publicly available all data and software utilized in the research process, which includes code (e.g., Python, Jupyter Notebooks, R, MATLAB) used to perform data analysis and produce the manuscript’s figures. As stated in the AGU requirements for publication, these codes should be made available on a free and open platform and preserved in a repository, hence providing a citation with an appropriate DOI. In this study, we look at the Data Availability Statement sections of 55 papers published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR): Space Physics during the month of July 2026. We find that only 27.3% of papers provided publicly available software and/or code, and this includes articles that provided just the source code developed by an external entity. Another recent study (Zhai et al., 2026) also found that only 38.1% of articles published in JGR: Space Physics between 2021 and early 2026 made software/code available in either a discipline-specific or general repository. These preliminary results help us understand that, although such software and code availability is mandatory, many papers have been published without it. This highlights how both authors and reviewers have a role in making the Data Availability Statement accessible and accurate according to AGU journal regulations. As we move forward and evaluate the Data Availability Statement sections of more papers to come leading up to October 2026, we expect the same low number of publicly available code and software utilized for the execution of space physics research.