The Geoscience Paper of the Future Initiative

Overview

In the near future, scientists will routinely use new tools to develop research papers that will document all the associated digital objects (data, software, workflows, etc.). This will make science more open, promote fair credit of scientific contributions, and facilitate reproducibility.

The Geoscience Papers of the Future (GPF) is an initiative to encourage geoscientists to publish papers together with the associated digital products of their research. This means that a paper would include: 1) Documentation of datasets, including descriptions, unique identifiers, and availability in public repositories; 2) Documentation of software, including pre-processing of data and visualization steps, described with metadata and with unique identifiers and pointers to public code repositories; 3) Documentation of the provenance and workflow for each figure or result.

The Geoscience Papers of the Future Initiative has two major components:

A Special Section of the AGU Earth and Space Science journal that will highlight GPFs. We have partnered with the largest scientific society in geosciences to create a special issue of their new cross-disciplinary journal to encourage submissions of GPFs that will help move the geosciences community to publish all digital objects resulting from their research.
A training program that offers training sessions for geoscientists to learn best practices in software and data sharing, provenance documentation, and scholarly publication. These training sessions will be offered in different modalities throughout 2015 (e.g. AGU Fall Meeting, GSA, ESIP, etc.). Training materials will be freely available on line. Training sessions will be offered upon request at other institutions and community events. 

Links

• Website