Editorial

Welcome to JAMES, The Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems. JAMES brings together scholarly articles on a wide range of disciplines centered around physical modeling of the Earth system, including numerical methods, physical parameterizations, data assimilation, simulations of weather, climate, and other geophysical processes, and tests of models against observations. JAMES welcomes both value-added review articles and short technical tutorials.

Modeling work includes both basic science and more practical efforts such as organized tests against observations and real-world applications. JAMES welcomes manuscripts reporting work of both types.

A strong team of Editors organizes and evaluates the anonymous peer review of manuscripts submitted to JAMES. The Editors interact with an Advisory Board. Authors are given the option of opening up their manuscripts for an open, informal, moderated online discussion, which runs in parallel with the anonymous peer-review process. To hold down costs, manuscripts are entered into the online discussion in their raw, submitted form, without typesetting or copy editing. The informal discussion of a manuscript is closed, and removed from the JAMES web site, once the formal review process has ended, regardless of the outcome.

When a manuscript is accepted for publication, it is laid out, typeset and copy edited by the Charlesworth Group, a global publishing enterprise. It is then posted on the JAMES web site. JAMES can also make available online supplementary material including animations, datasets, and source codes. Such supplementary online content must in all cases be associated with a published article. It should be formatted using open standards, and should be accessible in useful form without the need to pay for proprietary specialized commercial software.

The business office of JAMES is operated by IGES, the Institute of Global Environment and Society. IGES bills authors for page charges, and makes payments to the Charlesworth Group.

All articles published in JAMES are made available online, free of charge, to everyone. The costs of publication are covered through page charges, which, interestingly, are lower than those of most of our competitors. Copyright is retained by the authors, through the Creative Commons license.

We have created JAMES in order to provide a scholarly “home base” for modelers of the Earth System. We invite your submissions and your readership, and look forward to serving the community in the years ahead.

David Randall

Chief Editor

February 19, 2009