The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is the definitive scholarly society for the Earth and space sciences. Founded in 1919 and headquartered in Washington DC, AGU publishes about 24 peer-reviewed journals covering geophysics, atmospheric and ocean sciences, hydrology, planetary science, and space physics - more than 6,000 research and review articles a year. Since 2013, AGU journals have been published in partnership with Wiley, which handles hosting, production, and institutional sales on agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com, while AGU retains full editorial control.

If you work anywhere in the Earth and space sciences, you will almost certainly publish in - or cite - an AGU journal. This guide covers how to choose among the AGU titles, what open access costs, how peer review works, and how to submit through GEMS.

AGU's ~24 journals fall into three broad groups:

• Flagships - AGU Advances (selective, gold OA), Geophysical Research Letters (rapid letters, gold OA), and Reviews of Geophysics (invited reviews).
• The JGR family - seven-plus disciplinary sections of the Journal of Geophysical Research, from Atmospheres to Space Physics, mostly hybrid.
• Specialty and fully-OA titles - Water Resources Research, JAMES, Earth's Future, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (G-Cubed), Earth and Space Science, GeoHealth, Space Weather, Tectonics, Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, Radio Science, Community Science, and Perspectives of Earth and Space Scientists.

AGU also publishes Eos, its freely available news magazine, which is not a research journal.

AGU has been steadily converting its portfolio to open access: G-Cubed converted in 2022, GRL transitioned starting with late-2022 submissions, and Water Resources Research went fully OA on 1 January 2024. Roughly half of the ~24 journals are now fully gold OA, the remainder hybrid; by 2023, about 63% of all AGU articles were published open access. All new AGU journals launch as gold OA. Articles are published under CC BY licenses, and green self-archiving is permitted portfolio-wide.

AGU is explicit that no accepted paper is turned away for inability to pay: automatic waivers apply to authors in low- and middle-income countries, and case-by-case discounts and full waivers are available to anyone else. There are no page or excess-length charges on OA titles - the APC is the only fee.

• Model: single-anonymized review is the default across AGU journals; reviewers may sign their reviews.
• Editors: working scientists appointed by AGU; the society, not Wiley, controls all editorial decisions.
• Transfers: manuscripts can be transferred between AGU journals (e.g., from AGU Advances or GRL to a JGR section) with reviews carried over.
• Turnaround: varies by title; GRL's letters format is built for speed, while JGR sections take longer - check each journal's page for current statistics.

1. Pick the journal. Match your paper's length and scope: letters to GRL, full disciplinary papers to a JGR section, cross-cutting advances to AGU Advances.
2. Follow the AGU author guidelines. AGU uses its own author-date citation style (AGU style); grammar and reference formatting are checked at revision, not submission.
3. Prepare your manuscript. Use the AGU Word or LaTeX template on SciSpace; AGU also accepts submissions authored in Overleaf, Curvenote, or Authorea.
4. Submit via GEMS. Every AGU journal uses GEMS (Geophysical Electronic Manuscript Submission), AGU's editorial system powered by eJournalPress - not Editorial Manager or ScholarOne.
5. Meet the data policy. AGU requires data and software availability statements, with data deposited in a FAIR-aligned repository before acceptance.

AGU is a member of COPE, OASPA, and STM, and follows COPE guidance on corrections and retractions. Its Ethical Obligations for authors, editors, and reviewers apply across all titles, and AGU was an early adopter of FAIR data requirements in the Earth sciences - availability statements are enforced at acceptance, not merely encouraged.