🚀 Pilots

The primary objective of the second phase of the project Opening Reproducible Research (o2r) is to use Executable Research Compendia (ERCs) for actual scientific publications. The o2r team is implementing pilots for several work packages:

• In collaboration pilots, we work with publishers on Virtual Special Issues (VSIs). In these VSIs, submitted articles will have ERCs as supplemental material - an evolutionary use of ERCs.
• In a self-hosted pilot, we extend Open Journal Systems (OJS) to make the ERC itself the item under review in a demonstration journal. The pilots are supported by operating infrastructure and we will support authors, reviewers, and readers to enhance their scholarly communication with ERCs.

The three pilots cover current publication practices from large scale publishers to independent journals. The pilots are accompanied user studies and monitoring, in order to gain insights about the costs and benefits of ERC-based research publications. All pilots require the integration of o2r services and tools in existing, established IT systems and organisational workflows - we thank the collaborating publishers and editors as well as all authors and editors for their participation and open-mindedness!

Collaboration pilots

The diversity of the VSIs, potentially covering journals from a variety of geoscience disciplines, allows to reach the broad authorship and readership of the involved journals. It evaluates the creation and inspection process for ERCs outside of a prototypical lab setting, so the technical infrastructure for ERCs is completely overhauled to support a growing number of users.

✍️ Information for authors

📣 Open call for almost reproducible papers

🕵️ Information for reviewers

In case of questions, you can always contact us.

Copernicus Publications Virtual Special Issue

Status: First review started with loose integration or ERC (communication of ERC URL via coverletter and handling editor). We are currently collecting more showcases.

Participating journals and papers:

• Earth System Science Data (ESSD)
  • Deep-sea sediments of the global ocean by Markus Diesing (see RC1 for ERC information)

Next steps:

• We are looking for more Copernicus journals to participate in the virtual special issue! See the Open Call for Participation in Virtual Special Issue for Reproducible Research.
• Integration of ERC form field to submission forms and adding of extra reviewer questions to the review form.
• Direct display of ERCs from the article reading page.

Self-hosted pilot

The self-hosted pilot replaces the traditional paper with ERCs. It demonstrates ERCs’ potential to stakeholders and provides a platform for evaluation of ERCs in education. The self-hosted pilot is also used to investigate the impact of ERCs on understanding, complementing or even replacing traditional reading material in Geoinformatics courses. The students also have the opportunity of gaining first experiences as academic authors by submitting they final project report as an ERC.

Example usage of the self-hosted pilot based on OJS is described in this blog post.

👉 We are open for collaborations with OJS journals

We are always looking for feedback and are open for collaboration with OJS developers and OJS journal maintainers who are interested in enhanced reviews and publications powered by ERC on OJS.

Get help

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us:

• ❓ Ask a question on Stackoverflow using the tag erc or executable-research-compendium.
• 📨 Send us an email to o2r.support@uni-muenster.de if you have specific questions you prefer not to share publicly.
• 💬 Join our public pilots chat room on Gitter: