Looking for Review articles for MWR

When I became Chief Editor this year, one of my goals is to increase the number of Review articles we publish. Few may know, but one of the departments in MWR is entitled "Review." Few papers have been published over the years in that department. In my mind, two good examples include:

Keyser, D., and M. Shapiro, 1986: A Review of the Structure and Dynamics of Upper-Level Frontal Zones. Mon. Wea. Rev., 114, 452–499.

Schultz, D.M., and P.N. Schumacher, 1999: The Use and Misuse of Conditional Symmetric Instability. Mon. Wea. Rev., 127, 2709–2732; Corrigendum, 128, 1573.

If you are interested in contributing a Review article, please let me know. Also, if there is a topic of a Review article that you would like to see and that would be appropriate for MWR, please let us know and I will try to identify potential authors.

Harvard professors to vote on open-access

Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

The full article from the New York Times is here.

Why early-career scientists should review papers

Sometimes when I ask prospective reviewers to review a paper, I hear that they are too inexperienced to review the paper (or some other similar reason). Here is what I told an early-career scientist once.

1) Reviewing papers is something that I believe people should start early in their career. I wouldn't have asked you if I didn't think you could do this.

2) Reviewing papers is good practice for writing and revising your own research papers.

3) I have several other reviewers in mind to review this paper, so your opinion isn't the only one to be considered.

4) Reviewing a paper means that you get to see the paper before it is published. Otherwise, you can't see the paper.

5) Reviewing this paper might give you some ideas for your own research.

6) Reviewing this paper will force you to accelerate your learning on some related topics.