The Open Atmospheric Society takes a new approach to atmospheric science, becoming the first international society of its kind to be a cloud-based online organization
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 16, 2014 – The Open Atmospheric Society, known as “The OAS” for short, announces its formation, and readiness to accept charter members. The purpose of The OAS is to provide a paperless and entirely online professional organization that will represent individuals who have been unrepresented by existing professional organizations that have become more activist than science based in their outlook. It also aims to provide a professional peer reviewed publication platform to produce an online journal with a unique and important requirement placed up-front for any paper submitted; it must be replicable, with all data, software, formulas, and methods submitted with the paper. Without those elements, the paper will be rejected. This focus on replicability up front is not found in other similar organizations that publish scientific results.
John Coleman, Founder of The Weather Channel had this to say
It is very gratifying to hear of the formation of The Open Atmospheric Society. A new Meteorological organization and scientific publication have been greatly needed for more than a decade. It is unfortunate that the American Meteorological Society has become totally politicized and conducts itself in total violation of the basic scientific principle of open debate; encouraging competing points of view to be presented and published.
I allowed my Professional Membership in the AMS expire many years ago after being an active member, attending National Conferences and reading The Bulletin of the AMS for many years. Several events occurred that made it clear to me that the society was in the control of people who were using it to complete their personal agendas and the Society would was becoming closed and dogmatic. I look forward to membership in the OAS.
Joseph D’Aleo AMS Fellow, and Certified Consulting Meteorologist adds:
The AMS, AGU and other professional society editors have slow-walked and thrown up obstacles to papers that challenge the “consensus” position, usually forcing authors to go elsewhere to publish their work. They have fast tracked other papers when issues arose that threatened that position. The AMS had policy advocacy as one of the top organizational goals. A professional scientific society should only advocate for good science and leave the policymaking to those elected to determine the policies based on the very best science.
The OAS, whose motto: verum in luce means “truth in the light”, offers not only a place for a free exchange of ideas, but a unique Internet cloud-based journal publishing platform providing emphasis on open review and reproducibility requirements up-front. Here are a few points of interest:
- Open membership— Associate members, anyone who has an interest in atmospheric science, can join at a basic rate, providing interdisciplinary membership. Professional full voting members, will require a degree in atmospheric sciences or related earth or physical science disciplines, or three published papers in these subjects. Student members get a reduced rate, similar to associate members with option to full member elevation. More details at The OAS Charter.
- Open journal— The Journal of the OAS will be free to read by the public. Open science— a transparent online peer review process
- No other journal asks this upfront: strict OAS Journal submission requirements—technical submissions to the Journal by members must include all source data, software/code, procedures, and documentation to ensure reproducibility of the paper’s experiment or analysis by external reviewers.
- Author account—each author and co-author will have accounts for collaboration, submitting papers, making edits, and responding to reviewers.
- Emphasis on reasonable publication turnaround, 3 months or less.
- DOI’s will be assigned and provided with each publication.
- The OAS will offer press releases and web video assistance for authors to explain papers clearly and effectively to the general public. It will also occasionally offer statements and positions regarding atmospheric science as it relates to current news.
- Organizational activity will be conducted entirely online – This means no costly brick and mortar infrastructure, no costly postal mailings journals, and no need for warehousing paper files and publications.
The formation of The OAS represents a new way of conducting the scientific method, and welcomes those who feel their professional interests are not being served with the current collection of professional societies who focus on meteorology and climatology. The upcoming Journal of the Open Atmospheric Society has been assigned an official ISSN publication number by the Library of Congress (ISSN 2373-5953) and is registered with CrossRef, the world’s leading scientific publication identifier providing Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) for publications.
If you would like more information about this new society, please e-mail us at contact (at) theoas dot org or visit online at http://theoas.org to learn more or to become a member.
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Follow The OAS on Twitter, here: https://twitter.com/The_OAS
Personal Note:
This is a project that has been two years in the making and was borne out of feedback in this WUWT poll in May 2012:
Many, many, people have provided input that helped shape the concept, and a full launch had been planned for June of this year, but as Murphy’s Law would have it, the Annotum publishing platform used for the Journal became non-functional due to a major software upgrade introduced by WordPress in May. We had to wait for the issue to sort itself out, and now that it has, we have the final green light for the official launch. Here is what the workflow looks like:
Dr. Roy Spencer once said to me that trying to organize climate skeptics would be like “trying to herd cats”. While this Society is not trying to “herd” anyone, nor is it specifically focused on climate skepticism, it will serve to represent a group of people and ideas that up until now has been essentially ostracized because the ideas and viewpoints are counter to “consensus”. Until now, there has not been an organization that represented those people who feel that the other organizations have lost their way. Now, there is.
Feedback from members is going to be our most important asset. Participation will be the engine that drives change. Asking for replication up front will also drive change. While a replication requirement by itself does not guarantee that a scientific paper will be unfalsifiable (all the math and data could be valid, but the premise and/or conclusion can still be wrong), it is a step in the right direction that other atmospheric science journals have yet to demand. Imagine if Cook’s 97% paper or Mann’s Hockey sticks had replicability requirements before publishing.
Further announcements, calls for papers, and organizational notices will be posted in the coming days and weeks. In the meantime, you can get familiar with the charter, the goals, and the publishing platform.
Right now, membership is the most important goal. I encourage everyone who reads WUWT to become a member, or an associate member . Like any organization, it starts out small with an idea, and grows as momentum builds. As the momentum builds, so will the organization. My role is to put all the pieces in place, and help it grow.
For the inevitable naysayers, here is one of my favorite quotes from Winston Churchill:
“You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.” ― Winston Churchill
Thank you for your consideration. – Anthony Watts
Best of luck and success, I’m sure there are thousands of your supporters like me would like to join but do not have the funds but wish you well, the truth deserves it.
Congratulations to the creators.
Who can join?
Anyone for associate membership. Science/engineering degree for full membership. Follow the links to get the whole story.
Anthony, from the website: “Our motto: verum in luce means “truth in the light”.”
Maybe it should be included on the banner?
Reminds me of the good old days at the University of Chicago when two inhouse journals: The Journal of Political Economy and the Journal of Law & Economics played leading roles in reversing some widely held economic paradigms related monetary theory and antitrust economics. I hope OAS can play the same role in overturning beliefs about climate change.
As an aside, I hope you did check into the fact that an OAS (Organization of American States) already exists. People doing searches on Google or other search engines will be easily confused.
I am happy to see such an initiative emerging – time to get atmospheric sciences some fresh air. However, I have also a problem with the acronym, but a more serious one : us French associate OAS with Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, which was a terrorist group in the army aiming at overthrowing the government in 1961. In fact, googling OAS in France will return as first hit the wikipedia page about that organisation.
If you aim to reach french-speaking people, this may cause some concerns. No obvious solution (OrAS ? OAtS ? OASo ?), but maybe I’m creating a mountain out of a molehill.
Of course there will be a requirement for full disclosure of funding sources, right? And will there be open (public) discussion, or a closed peer review process?
Get IN! Well done Anthony and to all those who are supporting you. How the media react to this will be important. I realise that funding will be tight to begin with but it will help you enormously if you can locate a professional PR outfit to faithfully represent the ideals and ethics of the OAS to the lazy/sceptical media. Either that or maybe Joe Bast would act as media adviser during the start-up period.
Over here in the UK we are standing up and applauding this initiative.
Without a means to hide the decline of scientific integrity this org has no chance of success. Why would scientists submit papers if others only want to pick them apart looking for errors?
Pick them apart and look for errors…… Isn’t that the Scientific Method?
Indeed it is….but it was an actual complaint, I believe by Phil Jones, in the climategate emails. It was part of his reason for not cooperating. And the green nutters stupid enough to support them consider it harassment of the researchers to issue multiple FOI requests …which is an utterly stupid position to take because all the researcher has to do is put the data online and there would never be another FOI request for it.
It’s satire, Phil Jones’ refusal to give McIntyre the surface record data: ” why should I give it you, all you want to do is find something wrong with it.”
This has been a pervasive attitude amongst alarmist climatologists.
A good scientist with confidence in his work would welcome external, even hostile examination which would only validate his work.
Replication and validation are the cornerstones of science. This seems to be a key objective of this venture.
More power to them.
That was an antithetic parallel that obviates any criticism why this new open organization should, must exist. I would say fully 97% of all scientists believe such an organization has always existed when in fact that is not the case – see my original comment for an explanation.
Hopefully it was as witty as it is now circular.
Yeah, it is a travesty, isn’t it?
/grin
I thought clouds didn’t have anything to do with global warming.
Whack! (you are a funny person)
They are everything to do with it and the absence of any real understanding of the mechanisms of cloud formation and precipitation are the main reason why climate models are not “based on physical laws”.
Lots of nice detail is but the bits that matter aren’t , they’re guesses at “parameters”.
This has been direly needed and congratulations to all involved.
Climatology has been plagued by applications of the equivocation fallacy resulting from ambiguity of reference by terms in the language of climatology This has resulted in widespread misperception of a pseudo-science as a science .Thus, it would be well if the authors of articles submitted for publication to the new journal were to be required to write them in a disambiguated language developed for this purpose by the OAS.
” verum in luce ” It’s very telling that one has to say this for a scientific organization, but I get it. Let me predict there will similarly be new associations along these lines for physicists and others. Real geologists may not need a new one, they’ve only rotted along the edges and probably can recover. Biologists? Has activism killed this an objective science? Ecology has scientific tools, but I fear these have been overwhelmed by political activism – probably taught in their courses. There will be at least a small core of uncorrupted practitioners to form a new association – Jim Steele would be a good guy to do this.
I would also suggest another area of study that needs to clean up its act or start a new association, and that is Software Engineering – particularly in the areas of ethics and scientific modeling.
I hope they keep it open. Existing organizations started out that way.
I have a question about scope.
The title of the organization suggests it is interested in atmospheric issues, as does the first bullet point. While people with degrees in other earth sciences can be admitted, it appears that the subject matter is atmospheric science.
The title of this posts refers to climatology, but that is a much broader scope, including studies of the sea, and ice, both sea based an land based. Not to mention solar issues.
So is the scope of the organization the broad topic of climatology, or only the narrower aspects which emphasize the atmosphere?
Anthony, you need to correct the links to the OAS site. They are defaulting to oas.com INSTEAD or oas.org.
[the link to the charter page has been fixed, thanks -mod]
Anthony: Just joined up for a full membership to show my support. I used my ChE degree to qualify, although my JD has been my livelihood most of my life. Good onyer, we needed an independent scientific organization to get away from the politics. I expect that the papers will be limited to the science, without the hysteria.
This is big.
Understand the state of academic research, I received an email with this in it this morning:
If the question is, are they [principal investigators] are reading their contracts, I know they are reading parts of them since half of them seem to have a problem with one of the basic clauses that has been in every one of these agreements since 2010: They seem suddenly surprised that they should be required to permit public access to research products.
This follows a review meeting in Aug where a PI told me he didn’t think it was reasonable to put all of their relevant data in an archive. They should only put the data from their publications there, because it is the “best” data.
State-sponsored consensus just got a lot smaller.
Thinking along the same line.
As state sponsored “scientific concensus” on global warming is proven wrong by actual scientists.
And not just your run of the mill skeptic like myself.
The grants will start to dry up as the politicians that sign off on them.
Come to the shocking reality that they are going to be far more accountable to the owners of those monies they are handing over.
This little provision is going to be the cause for extreme angst among the Manns and co. of the fraud that is global warming.
“Open journal— The Journal of the OAS will be free to read by the public. Open science— a transparent online peer review process”.
Behold, the emperor has new clothes!
Science returning to actual science, what a novel idea.
Best of luck, Anthony!
It would be fun to have embership ranking # for all living members so that the length of membership is always viewable. Just like Massachusett’s Low Number Lottery for license plates: http://blog.mass.gov/transportation/rmv/rmv-low-number-license-plate-lottery-begins/
Finally!
Great news…
Good job. But I’m sure it will soon be designated a “hate site” by alarmists.
OAS is a crime against humanity. All those involved should be subject to some kind of Nuremberg tribunal and locked up. 😉
Congratulations Anthony and all the team that was involved with you in creating this important new organisation to further open access science. The public across the world will thank you all. The formation of this organisation will shake the foundations of the established societies and not before time.
Can I recommend that one of the first actions of OAS is to join with PubPeer, so that the peer review system cannot be gamed or seen to be gamed by Mann-style cliques?
Who knows, maybe science can make a comeback from the dark ages of Gore.
Meanwhile I wonder if Mann will sue OAS for, I don’t know, something or other.