The editor of the International Journal of Climatology has finally said that they do not require authors to provide supporting data

Yeah, it’s soo scientific isn’t it!

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4742

No Data Archiving at the International Journal of Climatology

by Steve McIntyre on December 28th, 2008

After nearly 2 months and several inquiries, the editor of the International Journal of Climatology has finally said that they do not require authors to provide supporting data. Given that funding agencies rely on academic journals to ensure that authors archive data (improperly abdicating their own responsibilities), the moral of this should be that the National Science Foundation and similar agencies should no longer consider the International Journal of Climatology as a qualified publication for the purposes of completing publication obligations under the terms of NSF grants.

The present inquiry arose out of Santer’s refusal to provide data.

On Nov 10, I wrote to the editor of the International Journal of Climatology:

Dear Dr McGregor,

I am writing to you in your capacity as editor of International Journal of Climatology.

Recently Santer et al published a statistical analysis of monthly time series that they had collated from 47 climate nodels. I recently requested a copy of this data from Dr Santer and received the attached discourteous refusal.

I was unable to locate any information of data policies of your journal and would appreciate a copy of such policies.

The form of my request was well within the scope of the data policies of most academic journals and I presume that this is also the case in respect to the policies of your journal. If this is the case, I would also appreciate it if you required the authors to provide the requested collation in the form used for their statistical analysis. While the authors argue that the monthly series could be collated from PCMDI data, my interest lies with the statistical properties of the time series, rather than with the collation of the data.

Regards, Steve McIntyre

On the same day, I received the following reply:

Dear Steve

Thank you for your mail. I have asked the publishers to respond to me regarding your question about data policy. Hopefully I should have a response over the next few days.

Glenn McGregor

I wrote back later on Nov 10 as follows:

Thank you for this follow up. For your information, although the Santer SI reported that the inclusion of more recent data does not affect their ”H1” results, they either omitted to carry out or neglected to report the results of including more recent data on their ”H2” results. I found that inclusion of data up to 2006, 2007 or to the most recent data reverses the conclusions reported in their Table III (using their own methods. I successfully emulated their Table III results for data up to end 1999). It is my intention to submit a comment to your journal reporting these calculations.

I would also like to comment on their H1 data but require the data already refused by Santer in order to carry out the analysis, and, if the data remains unavailable, will, of course, note this refusal in my planned submission.

Regards, Steve McIntyre

On Nov 24, not having any reply, I followed up as follows:

Have you had any response on this yet? For your reference, here are policies at Nature and Phil Trans Roy Soc, both of which require provision of data. In many econometrics journals, authors are required to archive data AND working code at time of submission.

Given the use of climate articles for policy, it is vital that journals have adequate data archiving policies and that they are enforced. In my opinion, you should ensure compliance has been completed (at least in escrow) as a condition of review – this is what econometrics journals now do – as this saves rear guard actions with reluctant authors.

Regards, Steve McIntyre

A couple of days ago, I followed up one more time:

Dear Dr McGregor, you undertook to get back to me in a few days. This has now drifted considerably. Have you determined whether your journal has any policy on data? It seems like a pretty fundamental point and one that your people should be familiar with.

 Regards, Steve McIntyre

Today I finally received the following unresponsive reply:

 Dear Dr McIntyre

 Santer et al.

Consistency of modelled and observed temperature trends in the tropical troposphere

International Journal of Climatology

Volume 28, Issue 13, Date: 15 November 2008, Pages: 1703-1722

In response to your question about data policy my position as Chief Editor is that the above paper has been subject to strict peer review, supporting information has been provided by the authors in good faith which is accessible online (attached FYI) and the original data from which temperature trends were calculated are freely available. It is not the policy of the International Journal of Climatology to require that data sets used in analyses be made available as a condition of publication. Rather if individuals are interested in the data on which papers are based then they are encouraged to communicate directly with the authors.

With this email I consider this matter closed.

Regards

Glenn McGregor

 My original request to McGregor was for a copy of the data policies of the journal. I guess that his answer is that there is no policy. In the present situation, I notified McGregor that Santer had already refused to provide the requested data. Now McGregor says that I am ”encouraged to communicate directly with the authors”.

 McGregor says that the paper was ”subject to strict peer review” – as opposed, I suppose, to casual peer review. Yet the ”strict peer review” was incapable of noticing that Santer et al had failed to carry out their analysis on the most recent data that they mention and failed to inquire as to the effect of such analysis.

 This sleaziness is very tiresome.

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Etiketter: Global Warming Hysteri, Temperaturdata