One especially interesting pointer Stephen gave me was to a new journal from European Geosciences Union titled Geoscientific Model Development. This is a journal that accepts articles about the nuts and bolts of building modelling software. It is apparently the only journal like it. Most of the other journals that climate scientists publish in will only accept papers on the "science" derived from the use of such models.
For those of us interested in how climate models are developed, this journal will likely be very relevant. What I find particular cool is the transparent peer-review process and open-discussion. This means for a particular article (say, this one on coupling software for earth-system modelling), you can read the paper and the current referee reviews (with the option to submit your own comments).
One issue with the journal Stephen mentioned is that it is currently not listed in any of the major scientific citation indices. Effectively this means that scientists do not get workplace "cred" for publishing in this journal. Thus, there is little motivation to publish even though, as Stephen put it, having a peer-reviewed publication to "rationalise" code and design decisions is essential to ensuring the scientific integrity of the models.
2 comments:
I think at some point - one hopes - the notion that you have to be listed in an archaic index will be surpassed by Google Scholar/Citeseer models.
The real metric is how many times that paper is referenced by others. Already I hear senior researchers talking about their most cited papers in terms of Google, not these other formats.
I guess it's a 'build it and they will come' model: insist on quality papers with a good review process, and the rest will follow. Cool idea for a journal, too.
Hey "ernie". Yeah, this was the first time I'd heard of work performance/productivity being measured mainly through a citation index. I didn't realise there was so much weight on publishing in indexed journals (or, that there is so little weight put on publications in unindexed journals).
What do you think about the transparent review process? It's fascinating from the standpoint of a newcomer to the academic world in that I feel like reading the feedback for other papers would make me a better writer.
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