We’ve just announced a special issue of the Open Access Journal Geoscientific Model Development (GMD):
Call for Papers: Special Issue on Community software to support the delivery of CMIP5
CMIP5 represents the most ambitious and computer-intensive model inter-comparison project ever attempted. Integrating a new generation of Earth system models and sharing the model results with a broad community has brought with it many significant technical challenges, along with new community-wide efforts to provide the necessary software infrastructure. This special issue will focus on the software that supports the scientific enterprise for CMIP5, including: couplers and coupling frameworks for Earth system models; the Common Information Model and Controlled Vocabulary for describing models and data; The development of the Earth System Grid Federation; the development of new portals for providing data access to different end-user communities; the scholarly publishing of datasets, and studies of the software development and testing processes used for the CMIP5 models. We especially welcome papers that offer comparative studies of the software approaches taken by different groups, and lessons learnt from community efforts to create shareable software components and frameworks.
See here for submission instructions. The call is open ended, as we can keep adding papers to the special issue. We’ve solicited papers from some of the software projects involved in CMIP5, but welcome unsolicited submissions too.
GMD operates an open review process, whereby submitted papers are posted to the open discussion site (known as GMDD), so that both the invited reviewers and anyone else can make comments on the papers and then discuss such comments with the authors, prior to a final acceptance decision for the journal. I was appointed to the editorial board earlier this year, and am currently getting my first taste of how this works – I’m looking forward to applying this idea to our special issue.