A new climate for meteorological publishing?
***This is a guest post from Fiona Hewer on behalf of the JISC OJIMS project***
Scientific information about weather and climate change is being scrutinised more than ever to meet the need for advice to policy-makers on greenhouse gas emissions and their consequences. The Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS), a world-leading publisher, and the British Atmospheric Data Centre, a NERC repository, have been working on new ways to provide scientific quality assurance and access to meteorological data, to meet this need, and the wider requirements of the meteorological sciences.
The internet provides many ways to give access to data and information on-line, from online journals and institutional repositories to project and personal websites. ”Overlay Journals” are websites that can sit above all these sources, collating information on a particular topic and providing quality control information, such as through a peer-review process. So, for users with an interest in a particular topic, an overlay journal gives wide, quality-controlled access from a single web site.
The OJIMS project (Overlay Journal Infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences) aimed to investigate overlay journal mechanics, create an open-access repository and evaluate business models for potential overlay journals. It has been funded mainly by the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme (Repository Start-up and Enhancement Strand) and also supported by NERC. The project has raised awareness of the potential benefits and obstacles to digital publishing in the meteorological community, including scientists and organisations in the public and private sectors.
The project activities included; surveys of scientists and stakeholder organisations; review of outputs from other JISC projects such as RIOJA and other work on open-access; identification of the benefits, risks and costs of two overlay journal scenarios; development of a document editor for overlay journals; and creation of a new document repository.
Fiona Hewer of Fiona’s Red Kite was engaged by RMetS to evaluate the business models. It evaluated the technologies and business cases associated with new overlay journals. It is hoped that this will lead to the publication of a data journal in the near future.
The OJIMS project outputs have been used to inform NERC’s information strategy.
The full reports can be downloaded here. More information is available on the project website including a link to the CEDA-docs demonstration repository.
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