A document by Shelley Stall. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Kristina Vrouwenvelder. Click on the document to view its contents.

Software and data citation are emerging best practices in scholarly communication. This article provides structured guidance to the academic publishing community on how to implement software and data citation in publishing workflows. These best practices support the verifiability and reproducibility of scientific results; sharing and reuse of valuable data and software tools, and attribution to the creators of the software and data. While data citation is increasingly well-established, software citation is rapidly maturing. With the current intensive use of software, including specialized tools and models for scientific research problems, the research community has begun to recognize that software, as a key research result and resource, requires the same level of transparency, accessibility, and disclosure as data. Software and data that support scientific results should be preserved and shared in scientific repositories for discovery, transparency, and use by other researchers. These goals can be supported by citing these products in the Reference Section of papers and effectively associating them to the software and data preserved in scientific repositories. Publishers need to mark up these references in a specific way to enable downstream processes, specifically those that enable automated attribution. Academic publishers wishing to stay current with best practices in the field are encouraged to follow the guidance provided here.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is pleased to submit this RFI response to 2021-13640 on improving federal scientific integrity policies. AGU is the largest global organization covering the Earth sciences with a mission “to support and inspire a global community of individuals and organizations interested in advancing discovery in Earth and space sciences and its benefit for humanity and the environment.” Fostering integrity is a key part of our new strategic plan and past activities and we are engaged in supporting integrity broadly, including with federal agencies. Although not a focus of these recommendations, AGU has often spoken up through position statements and letters related to scientific integrity. Several examples are listed in the references. With this perspective, we urge OSTP to consider two points that we elaborate below: • Fostering integrity–and in turn public trust in science and science policy–requires a broad, holistic view of practices that extend beyond the typical focus on transparency and ethics to include ensuring deeper public engagement, addressing diversity and inclusivity in science and supporting the backbone infrastructure that enables all of these. • The way science is supported, practiced and conducted is changing significantly, as is its dissemination and communication, and these changes have important implications for fostering integrity in the 21st century. Specifically, parts of the culture and reward system of science need improvement to align with these changes, and OSTP and federal policy can be a strong proactive force in enabling this change. This is particularly the case if these policies and practices provide leading examples and extend to federal grants. Many other organizations would then align.

The academic literature is the primary source for current developments in science. But limited access to journals as well as the widespread use of technical jargon can inhibit the dissemination of new knowledge to scientists from other fields and to non-scientists. These serve as major barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration with non-geoscientists and to efforts to further public understanding of geoscience research. Meanwhile, traditional science news focuses on topics of obvious interest to the public, such as geohazards or climate change. While engaging with non-geoscientists on these topics is important, the majority of geoscience research lacks a mechanism for generating public interest. “Bites” sites, originally introduced in the astronomy community, are blogs dedicated to communicating new developments in science to a broad audience. Each bite is an engaging, short (400-700 word) summary that explains an exciting new scientific paper and discusses its importance in the field. Bites are typically written by graduate students and other early career scientists about recently published articles that have not been picked up by more traditional science news outlets. These sites serve three key purposes: 1) to keep the interested public – especially university students who may consider careers in geoscience – up to date with recent developments in the field, 2) to generate attention for new work that traditional science media outlets may miss, and 3) to give early career scientists practice with public-facing writing and editing, which are critical skills both within and beyond academia. Here we present the new site Geobites, targeted at communicating new geoscience (broadly defined) research to the public. We show examples of articles on Geobites, diagram the structure of a good article, present initial site analytics, and solicit feedback from the geoscience communication community.