JISC

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This project developed the mechanisms which could support both a new Journal of Meteorological Data and an Open-Access Repository for documents related to the meteorological sciences.

Executive Summary

The Overlay Journal Infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences (OJIMS) project developed the mechanisms that could support both a new on-line Journal of Meteorological Data and an Open-Access Repository for documents related to the meteorological sciences. The project had three fundamental aims:

• Creation of overlay journal mechanics
• Creation of an open access subject based repository for Meteorology and atmospheric sciences
• Construction and evaluation of business models for potential overlay journals

The concept for the Open-Access Repository is a single comprehensive, access point to meteorological information including non peer-reviewed articles, and new types of information used in modern scholarly practice such as web-pages and podcasts. It would improve the quality of scientific study by increasing access to meteorological information by researchers and other stakeholders and assuring quality. Quality would be assured by editorial oversight and a kite-marking scheme that marks entries with the status of peer-review (or none) and displays user ratings.

Subject repositories in other disciplines are well-used and have become a part of daily practice for researchers. There is no subject repository for meteorology at present. A demonstration repository CEDA-docs was created by BADC as part of the OJIMS project. A survey of delegates at the NCAS conference found that at least 70% of respondents rated the idea of a repository as a great idea that they would use, with as many rating a single point of access to other repositories as the most appealing feature. To do this, the open-access repository should include the facility to provide access to other repositories through overlay mechanics. There are two problems with this idea. The overlay mechanics do not currently allow direct access to other repositories. Researchers could search them for articles, but to access the full text (or other content) they would have to exit the site and enter the other repository site. Also the survey suggested that uptake of the existing repositories that could be overlaid is low; only 38% of respondents archive their material in any institutional repository. Therefore, in order to provide comprehensive access to meteorological information the new repository would have to achieve a step-change in rates of depositing of information. Sustainable funding for the Open-access repository would be best ensured by finding a national organisation with a core interest in improvement of the scholarly process through exploitation of technology. Further support could be achieved through encouragement to use the repository from research institution policy.

The proposal for the Journal of Meteorological Data is that it would be an on-line, peer-reviewed data journal. It would extend the scientific discipline of peer review to data, providing recognition for the work of creating data. The rigorous, but manageable, standards for metadata and documentation prescribed will facilitate re-use of the data, encourage appropriate application of the data to scientific problems and enable experiments to be repeated. A review process was proposed which encompasses three elements: a data description document, metadata and the data themselves. All three elements would be reviewed, but citation would be of the text article.

This concept also received a strong positive response from delegates at the NCAS conference with 67% saying they were more likely to deposit their data in a data centre if they can get academic credit through a data journal. Almost every respondent was either a user or a creator of data.

The BADC created an editing facility that authors and reviewers can use for metadata. The Journal of Meteorological Data would not require its own data storage, but would depend on a shortlist of registered repositories to provide that facility. Access to the data in the repository for the reviewer(s) would be necessary, and part of the review process would ensure that the data are present and accessible as described in the data description document. Readers of the journal would not access the data directly from the Journal of Meteorological Data, but via the registered repository and so would be subject to whatever licence restrictions applied to the data through the repository. Thus the Journal provides open access to the data description document and metadata, but not to the data themselves.

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