2021 ANNUAL MEETING

Call For Notebooks

 

As scientific studies become more data intensive and software dependent, reproducibility principles and other factors increase the importance of making work such as reusable workflows, software, and data-access procedures citable. This importance is reflected in new academic journals, such as the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), whose peer reviewed articles highlight the software itself, and often can include executable notebooks (such as Jupyter, R Studio, etc.) In this spirit, EarthCube is issuing its 2nd Call for Notebooks as primary, peer-reviewed submissions to a digital proceedings for this year’s EarthCube Annual Meeting.

 

Submitted notebooks should highlight a tool (i.e. software, service, library, dataset, standard), explaining and demonstrating interactively how the tool may be used to address a significant problem in geoscience.  There will be two tracks. One track will be focused on submissions where the goal is describing scientific outputs. In this case, the novelty is based on the analysis being done and the scientific conclusions drawn. The other is on demonstrating new software and tools. Here the emphasis is on new software and showing how it can be used. 

 

Submissions will be peer reviewed in terms of their impact on geoscience research and overall usability, by reviewers from the geoscience and cyberinfrastructure communities.  Authors of accepted notebooks will have the opportunity to present their notebook at the EarthCube Annual Meeting and their notebooks will be published in an EarthCube digital proceedings for others to discover, use, and cite.

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• Notebook abstracts are due April 15.

• Final notebooks are due on May 15.

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Guidelines: 

1) Submissions should provide a Jupyter notebook and use an EarthCube TAC template in Python 3 (an example can be viewed here, see the long version of the template for more details regarding the guidelines)

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2) Authors should share their notebook in a self-contained runnable environment (e.g., use of Binder or Docker is strongly recommended), so that reviewers and the community can run the notebook without having to install required libraries locally. 

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3) Submissions should take the form of an abstract (due April 15, 2021) and URL (due May 15, 2021)  to a repository containing the notebook.

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Rubrics and expectations

• Compliance  with EarthCube Notebook template and with guidelines in the “long version” of the template

• Users and reviewers of the notebook should not be required to install anything on their machine nor to download  anything  (data  included)  manually to run the notebook

• In  the  “Technical  contributions”   section  of  the  notebook  template,  provide details of  what EarthCube  tool  the notebook leverages and how EarthCube  tools are used in the notebook

• The scope should not change from what was proposed in the application

• Giglio, Donata; Carter, Shay, R.; Chastang, Julien, C; McHenry, Kenton; Schreiber, Lynne; Zaslavsky, Ilya (2022). Evaluation Rubric for Reviewing Standardized Notebooks. In EarthCube Organization Materials. UC San Diego Library Digital Collections. https://doi.org/10.6075/J0V40VCV

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Student Funding and Educational Opportunity: Application due April 15, 2021

​Ten to fifteen awards of up to $2,000 that target the development of  Python 3 notebooks that follow an EarthCube TAC template and leverage EarthCube projects, e.g., for research projects, for educational activities, and more broadly to illustrate tool capabilities, will be available to students interested in gaining additional skills in scholarly communication/publication of their work. A noncomprehensive list of EarthCube tools can be found here.

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To be eligible for funding, students must be U.S. citizens, U.S. nationals, or permanent residents of the United States and affiliated with a US institution. Financial support will be in the form of a check to non-University of California students. For University of California students financial support will be processed through Financial aid. 

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Interested students must submit an application by April 15, 2021, including an abstract which describes how the notebook will work and what EarthCube tool will be leveraged (not the notebook itself). Applicants will be notified in early April about whether their notebook will be considered as a finalist for an award. Final notebooks must be submitted by May 15, 2021, and award recipients will be notified in June, after a review process. 

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A workshop (April 12th at 2 PM PDT) <Video recording> on using the notebook template, the guidelines, and Binder (for enhancing long-term usability and reusability) will be organized and we strongly encourage applicants to attend. A Q&A session (April 26th at 2 PM PDT) <video recording>will also be organized, closer to the notebook submission deadline. 

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This initiative is part of a long term commitment to promote well-documented and easily reusable code that leverages EarthCube tools. Though future opportunities may be open to other programming environments, the present call is restricted to Python 3 notebooks.

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Timeline:

• April 15 Extended due date - student applications and abstracts due

• April (early) - notification to student notebook finalists

• April 12 at 2 pm PDT - Notebook workshop

• April 15 - abstract deadline to annual meeting

• April 26 at 2 pm PDT - Q&A session

• May 15 - Final notebook submission

• June (Early) - review results and award recipients announced

• June 15-17 -EarthCube  Annual Meeting

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Template Notebook (final version of the template will be provided in early April):

https://github.com/earthcube/NotebookTemplates