We will describe the novel process of allowing notebooks as a class of submissions in this year's EarthCube Annual Meeting. We did this to capture the software coming out of the geoscience community and to elevate software as a reusable, preservable, citable, FAIR software artifact. We will discuss challenges related to submission, review, presentation, and publication and how we addressed them.
With the growing importance of software within scientific research and the need to go beyond paper publications to adequately capture and document software as scientific artifacts, notebooks are being seen more and more as a means of addressing this. Towards this goal, EarthCube, the NSF program driving the advancement of software cyberinfrastructure within the Geosciences, issued a call for notebooks (https://www.earthcube.org/EC2020) as a primary class of submissions at the 2020 Annual Meeting (https://github.com/earthcube2020). Overall, our goal was to capture the software coming out of the geosciences community and to elevate software as a reusable, preservable, citable, FAIR, software artifact, by allowing software to be submitted, reviewed, published, and preserved. We will describe the novel process of having notebooks as a class of submissions in this year's EarthCube Annual Meeting. Specifically, the proposed talk will describe the typical elements involved in paper publications (Submission, Review, Presentation, and Publication) and how they were performed differently for notebooks in this venue, including what challenges we found and how we overcame them. We chose notebooks as the means to do this, and all of the submitters chose to submit Jupyter notebooks. Even though this was not part of the call, the submitted (and accepted) notebooks fell into two categories: they either demonstrated tools or demonstrated science results in a both readable and runnable manner. This talk will be suitable for attendees with a basic understanding of Jupyiter and its relevance to disseminating science beyond just paper publications.