News

Call for Editorial Board

The ecoinvent Centre is looking for EXPERTS for its International Editorial Board.

The ecoinvent Centre is planning a broadening of its data supply to include more details, more technologies, and a wider geographical coverage. As part of these efforts, the ecoinvent Centre is now establishing an International Editorial Board, thereby widening the group of experts that perform the review, validation and editing of the ecoinvent datasets before inclusion in the ecoinvent LCI database. Members of the Editorial Board are appointed by the ecoinvent Board of Directors and work under the supervision of the ecoinvent LCI Expert Group that maintains the ecoinvent data quality guidelines and software systems.

Each editor is responsible for a specific expertise area, as either

• Activity editor, responsible for data for a specific industry, technology or other human activity (possibly limited to a specific geographical area).
• Geographical editor, responsible for data for a specific country or other geographical area, ensuring that geographical variation in technologies are correctly and consistently captured and integrated across all datasets for that area.
• Inventory indicator editor, responsible for a specific emission (or group of emissions), e.g. particle emissions, or other environmental pressure indicators (e.g. resources, land use, noise, social aspects), ensuring the consistency across all datasets. Inventory indicator editors are also responsible for monitoring scientific developments and suggesting modifications to the way the inventory indicator is described in the ecoinvent quality guidelines for data providers.
• LCIA editor, responsible for the maintenance of the ecoinvent versions of major LCIA methods (including popular methods such as MIPS, Ecological footprint and Carbon Footprinting).
• Language editor, responsible for checking consistency and quality of translations within a specific language version of the ecoinvent database, and may maintain a vocabulary for automatic pre-translations.

  
For each area of expertise, a lead editor and one or more co-editors share the work. Over time, as increasing amounts of data and increasing detail puts an increasing load of work on any one editor, responsibility areas will be subdivided and re-delegated.

Editors are also welcome to contribute as data suppliers, in which case the review and validation will be performed by one of the other editors.

   
The work:

Review and validation of datasets: Activity and LCIA editors receive draft datasets from data providers. Such draft datasets may be either new datasets or proposals for revisions of existing datasets. The datasets have been automatically pre-screened for errors and inconsistencies, but it is now the responsibility of the activity or LCIA editor to perform a manual review and validation according to the ecoinvent quality guidelines, before allowing the data enter into the ecoinvent database. Any identified errors or other suggestions are communicated to the data provider, who then re-submits the revised draft data to the editor. When the activity or LCIA editor is satisfied, the dataset is uploaded for consistency review by the geographical and indicator editors before final inclusion in the database. Versions in other languages than English are submitted to the relevant language editor. All review and validation procedures are software supported and monitored.

Review of data documentation and scientific articles: Documentation of the data collection may, in addition to the documentation included in the datasets, be provided by the data providers in the form of papers for scientific publication. The review of such papers is also the responsibility of the subject editor.

User service: Editors are responsible for maintenance of the Internet “Talk” pages that will be established for each dataset or subject area. They are thus responsible for responding to scientific questions raised by the users, and to initiate editorial changes or error correction in datasets when necessary.

Continuing education: Editors are required to participate in on-line training courses provided by the ecoinvent Centre (free of charge) to keep their skills and understanding of the ecoinvent data quality guidelines and procedures up-to-date.

 

Qualifications

• Good knowledge of the technical area of responsibility. Activity editors must have a good understanding of the international State-of-the-Art of the technologies involved. Geography editors should have knowledge of national statistics on economic activities (input-output tables) and national emissions reporting.
• A general understanding of environmental assessments and the role of LCI data.
• Good understanding of data quality issues.
• Commitment to high quality work.
• Responsiveness and willingness to participate in scientific dialogue.
• Independence of commercial interests in the area for which they are responsible.
• Activity editors must be able to produce an LCI dataset according to the ecoinvent quality guidelines.
• While editors may delegate practical tasks to other experts under their supervision, they should understand that they are responsible for the editorial work, and not just “figure-heads” for the work of others.

   
Monitoring:

The work of the Editorial Board is continuously monitored with respect to response time and quality of work as assessed by data providers, peers and users. Editors will receive feedback on their performance. The monitoring will be used to improve our service.

 

Remuneration:

Your motivation to participate in the Editorial Board should primarily be academic interest, not pecuniary reasons. Nevertheless, you will receive a free ecoinvent license (value: 1'800 Euro) and a small remuneration in proportion to the work performed. The remuneration will be adjusted to ensure a fair distribution over the different editorial tasks. Additional rewards for high quality performance will be provided.

 

Application:

Applications to become member of the ecoinvent Editorial Board are sent by e-mails to editors(at)ecoinvent(dot)org no later than the 1^st November 2008. The application should include:

1. The editorial position for which you wish to be responsible, either

• As activity editor, specified by ISIC Rev 4 code for industrial activities, or COFOG, COICOP, or COPNI codes for government, household or NGO activities, respectively. See HERE for the relevant codes. If you wish to be responsible for a specific technology only, please specify this in addition.
• As geographical editor, specified by country/countries or other geographical delimitation.
• As indicator editor for a specific (group of) emissions or other environmental pressure indicators.
• As LCIA editor for a specific LCIA method.
• As language editor for a specific language version.

2. Your expectations to the amount of hours per month that you can commit to the work.

3. Aspects of your CV relevant for the position. Declaration of your commercial interests, if any, in the field of competence that you are applying for.

4. Your name, institution, address and e-mail address.

  
--> Printable version of the above text in pdf here.