TOTO

History and Future of AOGS

Kenji Satake
AOGS President – 2012 to 2014
The University of Tokyo

In 2002, at National Central University in Taiwan, I attended a brain storming discussion with Ian Axford, Wing Ip, Yosuke Kamide, D.K. Lee and others to create a new geoscience society, similar to AGU or EGU, in Asia and Oceania region. We discussed about vision, designed the society, and set up three goals: (1) to organize the first meeting; (2) to hold meetings annually; and (3) to create an electronic journal for the society. I was told later from Yosuke Kamide that it would be a long-term project, probably more than a decade, so a young scientist like me was invited. It seemed to me a dream or thoughtless to make such a society from nothing. Nevertheless, we succeeded to hold the first meeting in 2004 in Singapore, and have kept the annual meetings. I served the first Secretary General from 2004 through 2006, and contributed drafting the constitution. Then I served as president of Solid Earth section between 2006 and 2008, and stayed as a Council member until 2008. In 2011, I was elected as vice president and returned to the Council.

From 2012 to 2014, I served as the AOGS president. The two annual meetings during my tenure as the president were both epoch-making. The 2013 meeting in Brisbane was the tenth anniversary meeting and first time held in the Oceania region. The 2014 meeting in Sapporo recorded more than 3,000 participants and the largest meeting so far. I was pleased to see that we accomplished the second goal we set up in 2002. The AOGS annual meeting is now well recognized by geoscientists not only in Asia and Oceania, but also in the world.

The AOGS started to publish Geoscience Letters in 2014, as one of the Springer Open Access journals. As a member of publication committee, which discussed about the journal for several years and finally proposed to start such a journal, I have been serving as the Editor-in-Chief. Geoscience Letters has published 32 papers in the first two years, and in the third year (2016), we published 30+ papers, and more papers are in review. We anticipate that Geoscience Letters will be listed as an SCI journal, and will become a popular journal of Geoscience in Asia and Oceania. When Geoscience Letters becomes an SCI journal, all of our initial goals we set up in 2002 will be accomplished. But it should not be the goal, but starting point for AOGS to further develop in Asia and Oceania region, which has the largest population and most rapidly developing region in the world.