A new professional society for meteorology and climatology is announced

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:

Thank you for your consideration. – Anthony Watts