Editorial
New Editorial roles
This is likely to be my last or second-to-last piece as the Editor of BAMOS. While it has been a fantastic experience and I have enjoyed contributing to the Society very much, I have found it to be very time consuming and the role has eaten into a lot of my working time. In order for BAMOS to continue to flourish, I believe the Society needs to have an Editor who is able to work on BAMOS as part of their normal working duties (not on a weekend/voluntary basis). Back in November I had a meeting with the BAMOS Editor in Chief and the immediate past Editor in order to discuss how the BAMOS Editor role could be restructured. We came up with the idea to split the role into three positions (see below), each with a specific set of defined responsibilities. We then discussed and refined this proposal further with the AMOS Executive, where it became clear that the Editor could play a more active communications role for the Society. The proposal was presented to the Council for consideration and was agreed upon at the last meeting on 14 March 2014. A brief description of the new positions is given as follows: 1.
The Editor: responsible for gathering the news items and for collating and editing the articles for the issue before typesetting. The new Editor will also be active on social media and actively engage with other institutions (for example the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO and the Universities) to bring the latest news to the Society’s members. The Editor will additionally be responsible for the content and publication of the eNewsletter. The Editor will therefore fulfill a communications role within the Society and will be a paid position.
2.
Science Editor: this person will be responsible for the scientific content only (akin to a typical journal associate editor). They will be responsible for
President’s Column
Strategic goals and awards
After more than a year of effort, driven primarily by our past President Blair Trewin, AMOS now has a formal strategic plan. The plan defines the strategic goals of the society, which were formed through consultation with all members and accepted by Council last year. We have also developed a framework for operational implementation of that plan, which prioritises current and future AMOS activities in the context of the Society’s strategic goals. These documents can be found on our website1; any further feedback on these documents is welcome as they will be periodically reviewed by Council. Over the next year AMOS Council will be putting some new processes 1
www.amos.org.au/aboutus/
Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol. 27 page 21
organising the peer review of science articles and will actively engage with scientists to bring interesting articles into BAMOS. 3.
Typesetter: this role will simply be to take the collated acrticles from the Editor and produce the finished publication. The typesetting is particularly time consuming in the current setup.
We already have the Typesetter position filled and I have volunteered for the position of Science Editor in order to help the new Editor and Typesetter into their roles. However, we do not currently have anyone in position to be the Editor. A full advertisement and position description will be publicly available soon. If anyone would like any further details and/or to be considered for the Editor’s job then I encourage you to contact me directly. The new structure will have a probationary period of one year, after which it will be reviewed by the Council. I hope that the new setup will prove to be successful and improve the communication network for those within the Society, as well as maintaining the quality and value of BAMOS. Finally, I would also like to announce the winners of the Student Oral and Poster presentations at the recent AMOS conference (report to appear in the June issue). First prize in the Oral Presentation category went to Tim Cowan with honourable mentions to Linden Ashcroft, Sjoerd Groeskamp, Michelle Ho, Stephanie Jacobs, Andrew King and Teresa Parker. In the Poster Presentation category, first prize went to Chloe Lucas with honourable mentions to Mitchell Black, Darren Cox, Henry Ellis, Andrew Magee, Fiona McRobie, Henrique Rapizo and Jackson Tan. Many congratulations to all of those people. I will be in touch with the winners soon about possible contributions on their award winning work to BAMOS.
Duncan Ackerley
in place to allow us to efficiently deliver in the areas of high priority. As described in the strategic plan, one of our goals is, “To recognise excellence in the sciences covered by AMOS”, and accordingly we have a number of AMOS awards that honour the achievements of our members at all levels of seniority. For example, we present the Uwe Radok Award for the best Australian Ph.D. in the sciences covered by AMOS. Applications are now open for this award2 and I encourage you to nominate your eligible students to help acknowledge their achievements. We also honour the extended contributions of our members with the election 2
see www.amos.org.au/awards/ for details