PROFES 2017 has explicitly committed itself as the first conference in our field to take the first step in fostering open science in our community as a key to increase the accessibility, reproducibility, and replicability of our research outcomes. The steering principle is that all research output should be accessible to the public and that empirical studies should be reproducible. Please note that we are still experimenting with open science and strongly rely on your support and also feedback – in case of doubt, please ask.
Here follow our guidelines and recommendations for open data and open source, open access, and transparent discussions of the papers.
PROFES 2017 asks all authors for the disclosure of data to the public (within the limits of existing non-disclosure agreements*). The rest of the guidelines are recommendations and not mandatory. Your choice to use open science or not will not affect the review process for your paper.
Open Data and Open Source
Papers which rely on empirical data should disclose* the (anonymized and curated) data to increase reproducibility and replicability.
Either:
- Archive their data on preserved archives such as zenodo.org and figshare.com, so that the data will receive a DOI and become citable.
- Use the CC0 dedication (or the CC-BY 4.0 license) when publishing the data (automatic when using zenodo.org and figshare.com), as explained here.
Or: Self-archive their paper to make it open access (see below).
Similarly, we encourage authors to make their research software accessible as open source and citable.
We ask the authors to avoid putting the data/software on their own websites or systems like Dropbox, version control systems (SVN, Git), or service like Academia.edu and ResearchGate. Personal websites are prone to changes and errors, and more than 30% of them will not work in a 4 years period. Moreover, authors (or anybody else) should not have the ability to delete data once it is public. Simply use an archived only repository.
*Authors who cannot disclose industrial or otherwise non-public data, for instance due to non-disclosure agreements, are asked to please provide an explicit (short) statement in the paper.
Open Access
We encourage PROFES authors to self-archive their pre- and postprints in open, preserved repositories. This is legal and allowed by all major publishers including Springer (granted in the copyright transfer agreement), and it lets anybody in the world reach your paper.
If the authors of your paper wish to do this, we recommend:
- Upon submission to PROFES, submit your paper to arXiv.org and choose the default arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive license to distribute. The paper version at this point is before peer-reviewed, and it is called preprint.
- Upon acceptance to PROFES, revise your article according to the peers comments, generate a PDF version of it (postprint), and archive it on your personal webpage. You can submit your postprint to arXiv.org (which supports article versioning) only after an embargo period of 12 months.
Note that you are not allowed to self-archive the PDF of the published article, that is the one you can find on SpringerLink. Only self-archive your own generated PDFs.
We ask the authors to avoid putting the paper on their own websites or systems like Dropbox, version control systems (SVN, Git), or service like Academia.edu and ResearchGate. Personal websites are prone to changes and errors, and more than 30% of them will not work in a 4 years period. Moreover, authors (or anybody else) should not have the ability to delete data once it is public. Simply use an archived only repository.
In case of questions, please approach the Open Science co-chair Daniel Graziotin (daniel.graziotin<at>informatik.uni-stuttgart.de)