Plan overall GPF activities

Overall Goal

The overall goal is to demonstrate how papers will be published in the future, going beyond a PDF format and including software, datasets, and workflow all published in open and accessible ways that make the paper transparent, reproducible, and machine indexable. We refer to such a paper as a "geoscience paper of the future” (GPF), and part of this activity will be to define what that means.

Creating a GPF will include tasks such as data publication and citation, software publication and citation, describing software, using metadata standards, and capturing workflows and provenance. GeoSoft instructors will prepare participants through best practices in these topics, and be accessible to help as needed. No programming or computer science background is needed to participate.

Schedule

The major effort for this activity will occur from February to June 2015.

Commitment

A 2 day face-to-face meeting (Feb-March) followed by biweekly calls (March-May). Most of the work will be planned at the face-to-face meeting, with about 2 hours of work per week after that.

Outcomes

Each participant will generate a GPF about their own research.

A Special Issue of a geosciences journal (TBD) that will include all GPFs from this activity (editors could be among the participants). A separate paper co-authored by all participants will discuss challenging issues, best practices, and benefits synthesized by the group during this activity.

Participants

Selected members of the GeoSoft community who want to learn and demonstrate in practice how to write a GPF.

Phased Plan

I) Defining Scope (Jan-March): Anyone interested can write a page or so proposing what to do. The proposal should specify the target science paper that will be turned into a GPF, which could be: a) a paper they have already published; b) a paper they have not yet published; c) a paper from a colleague that they find useful; d) a seminar paper in their field that people would appreciate seeing published in this way. Proposals can be submitted by individuals or by small teams (up to 4 people if that makes the work more manageable). The proposals will be peer reviewed by the group in an open discussion phase, with the goal of ensuring that the scope of each proposal is feasible.

II) Face-to-Face Elaboration and Training (Feb-March): We will hold a 2-3 day face-to-face meeting (expenses covered by GeoSoft), where GeoSoft instructors will walk through the specific tasks to be covered and recommend best practices.

III) Biweekly Reports (March-May): Participants will be given two weeks to accomplish a specific task. Each group will keep an up-to-date electronic document (eg, web site, wiki, google doc) with a detailed report of the work done, which will form the basis for their GPF. A mailing list will be set up to address any questions or issues that may come up. The group will hold a telecon at the end of that period to synthesize what worked, what did not work, and lessons learned.

IV) Paper Preparation and Review (June): Participants will finalize writing their papers and review each other’s papers.

Additional Outcomes

• Awards to papers that best demonstrated some recognized quality of a GPF?
• A session with presentations of these papers will be held at the EarthCube All Hands meeting in June 2015?
• A session at AGU?
• The starting of a new GPF repository (within the journal? EarthCube?)
• Increase recognition for investments in software (eg by measuring software downloads or citations of these papers)?
• Ideas and visibility for follow-on EarthCube proposals?
• A Phase V on reproducibility: ask others to run the software, perhaps try it with their own data? Engage people that could use these papers in a classroom setting?