Open Science
Data Sharing
The Pulse community is committed to the FAIR Principles that research data must be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. We encourage the use of data repositories that are optimized for sharing, discovery, and that implement persistent identifier best practices.
Data Citation
We will be generating new data, but will also be using data already made publicly available by others. We will follow best practices to cite data correctly (in the References section of articles, using DOIs) as an important step in recognizing the importance of data in the research enterprise and in acknowledging the contribution of those who generously share their data. In this way, we are joining the Make Data Count movement.
Rapid Sharing of Science
We believe that there is an urgency to what we are doing in the Pulse Initiative. To reflect that urgency, we have a desire to release our findings openly and rapidly, in ways that are responsible and appropriate given the nature of the content. While many of us routinely share our findings by publication in the peer-reviewed literature, preprints can be a viable and valuable option for sharing findings with the broader community. Here we use the word “preprints” to include manuscripts that are on their way (or soon/eventually to be on their way) through the peer-review process and manuscripts that are a final product and not intended for publication in the peer-reviewed literature.
Suggestions for the Preprint Pathway to Sharing Results from the Watershed Project:
- Preprints should not prevent you from publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. It is wise to first check with editors at journals to ensure that publishing through a preprint server does preclude submission to a journal.
- The preprint servers of interest identified by researchers in the Watershed Project include: arXiv which is most commonly used in engineering, mathematics, statistics, and computer science, ChemRxiv, most commonly used in chemistry, and chemistry-adjacent fields (water quality, agriculture, energy, materials science), and the Earth and Space Science Open Archive from the American Geophysical Union.
- In addition to using preprint servers, it is also possible to host ancillary research materials on Zenodo (hosted by CERN). Zenoto is a generalist repository that can handle data, and other materials. In the past, Pulse has used Zenodo to share slide decks, and whitepapers that might not otherwise get a DOI.
- To ensure proper credit for all contributors we encourage everyone to collect all ORCID iDs at time of publication (in both preprints and peer-reviewed articles). That shows up downstream in bibliographic databases, and other indexes.
Data Exploration Tools
Working with large research datasets in cloud environments can be prohibitively expensive, and these costs can discourage exploration and engagement within and beyond the scientific community. This is why one of our goals in the Pulse Initiative is to select key datasets related to the work of the Pulse Community and make them available for exploration by anyone. While we anticipate that computational workflows will likely have to incur charges, our hope is that free access to explore datasets that we create, acquire, and/or curate will inspire curiosity and motivate others to use and build on what we make available. Our platform will provide baseline compute, interactive notebooks, and 10 GB free data storage to anyone at any institution, as well as to citizen scientists, and researchers without an institutional affiliation.