Description: A significant task during and after the execution of a scientific project is archiving the resulting datasets, which might serve as references for scientific papers and become the start point for undergoing related studies. This task demands a series of efforts not only from the data producer, who should deliver data along with a coherent description of its content and structure -- the so-called metadata--, but also from the data provider, who is responsible for its storage, transformation, distribution, and preservation in a consistent way. The researcher who produces the data plays an essential role in thissystem, like the autotrophs in the food chain, by feeding it with new information. But a complex description of the simulation scenarios and metadata profiles complicate the ingest activity, and he or she might become easily the bottleneck in the entire system. This presentation discusses the data management facilities adopted by C3Grid and addresses the innovative developments in the climate community to alleviate the metadata generation, extraction, and management such as Federico (Fedora Enabled Repository with Cocoon), a state-of-the-art AJAX frontend for the Fedora Commons Repository developed in the scope of the work package #3 of Wissgrid, Long Term Preservation of Research Archives.

Description: Der Report des Helmholtz Open Science Workshops „Zugang zu und Nachnutzung von wissenschaftlicher Software“ #hgfos16 behandelt die Themen Standards und Qualitätssicherung; Reproduzierbarkeit; Lizenzierung und weitere rechtliche Aspekte; Zitation und Anerkennung; Sichtbarkeit und Modularität; Geschäftsmodelle; Personal, Ausbildung, Karrierewege. Diese Themen sind eng miteinander verzahnt. Für jeden Themenbereich werden jeweils die Relevanz, Fragestellungen, Herausforderungen, mögliche Lösungsansätze und Handlungsempfehlungen betrachtet.

Description: Placing trust in scientific insight is an endeavor more complicated than it seems at the first glance. On the one hand, the scientific community strives for insights and explanations that hold as generalizable laws. On the other hand, science and research must deal with uncertainty, with questioning assumptions and recognizing epistemological issues. But in addition to this immanent complication, science runs the dangers of gambling away some of the trust placed in it when questionable research practices are used. Open Science as a reform movement aims to make science more transparent, increasing the quality of research, achieving reliable and reproducible scientific results, and thereby ultimately increasing trust in science. Currently, the Open Science movement is largely driven by (groups of) individual researchers organized in grassroots initiatives. We discuss some of these grassroots initiatives, as well as the impact they have had on improving research practices and driving methodological rethinking towards more transparent and robust research. We argue that fundamental change in scientific practice follows similar processes as social change. To take hold, such change processes require not only a quantitative increase in the adoption of changed practices, in this case the adoption of Open Science driven by rising numbers of grassroots initiatives. Complex change processes also benefit from action on qualitatively different levels, such as addressing institutional and system-wide changes, as well as a strengthened system of values based on principles of scientific theory. We introduce the German Reproducibility Network (GRN), a strategic community effort as a large-scale network initiative promoting these fundamental changes towards Open Science. The GRN approaches this goal as an interdisciplinary network in Germany: By more systematically establishing and developing collaborations among grassroots initiatives, research institutions, and other stakeholders like funding agencies, policymakers or publishers, we want to evoke a fundamental rethinking towards transparency and reproducibility in science. To achieve this goal, the GRN attracts members from the different stakeholder groups, facilitating exchange between them, encourages the formation of grassroots initiatives and of institutional Open Science working groups and policies via the membership guidelines, and bundles the voices of the GRN community when interacting with funders, policymakers or publishers. Further, the GRN aims to contribute to the methodical development of transparent research practices and their anchoring in training, teaching and research by acting as a coordination hub for Open Science activities and - in the long term - supporting them with infrastructure and grants. At the same time, the GRN also is intended as a platform for linking German Open Science actors with similar initiatives in other countries, like the already successful UK Reproducibility Network and initiatives currently being established in other countries such as Switzerland, Slovakia, or Australia. The GRN is intended as a catalyst to drive fundamental change and improvement of the science system. As such, discussing the GRN with the Open Science community will be valuable in order to tailor the activities and tools of the GRN to the needs of the community it aims to serve.

Description: Research software has become a central asset in academic research. It optimizes existing and enables new research methods, implements and embeds research knowledge, and constitutes an essential research product in itself. Research software must be sustainable in order to understand, replicate, reproduce, and build upon existing research or conduct new research effectively. In other words, software must be available, discoverable, usable, and adaptable to new needs, both now and in the future. Research software therefore requires an environment that supports sustainability. Hence, a change is needed in the way research software development and maintenance are currently motivated, incentivized, funded, structurally and infrastructurally supported, and legally treated. Failing to do so will threaten the quality and validity of research. In this paper, we identify challenges for research software sustainability in Germany and beyond, in terms of motivation, selection, research software engineering personnel, funding, infrastructure, and legal aspects. Besides researchers, we specifically address political and academic decision-makers to increase awareness of the importance and needs of sustainable research software practices. In particular, we recommend strategies and measures to create an environment for sustainable research software, with the ultimate goal to ensure that software-driven research is valid, reproducible and sustainable, and that software is recognized as a first class citizen in research. This paper is the outcome of two workshops run in Germany in 2019, at deRSE19 - the first International Conference of Research Software Engineers in Germany - and a dedicated DFG-supported follow-up workshop in Berlin.

Description: Open Science has established itself as a movement across all scientific disciplines in recent years. It supports good practices in science and research that lead to more robust, comprehensible, and reusable results. The aim is to improve the transparency and quality of scientific results so that more trust is achieved, both in the sciences themselves and in society. Transparency requires that uncertainties and assumptions are made explicit and disclosed openly. Currently, the Open Science movement is largely driven by grassroots initiatives and small scale projects. We discuss some examples that have taken on different facets of the topic: The software developed and used in the research process is playing an increasingly important role. The Research Software Engineers (RSE) communities have therefore organized themselves in national and international initiatives to increase the quality of research software. Evaluating reproducibility of scientific articles as part of peer review requires proper creditation and incentives for both authors and specialised reviewers to spend extra efforts to facilitate workflow execution. The Reproducible AGILE initiative has established a reproducibility review at a major community conference in GIScience. Technological advances for more reproducible scholarly communication beyond PDFs, such as containerisation, exist, but are often inaccessible to domain experts who are not programmers. Targeting geoscience and geography, the project Opening Reproducible Research (o2r) develops infrastructure to support publication of research compendia, which capture data, software (incl. execution environment), text, and interactive figures and maps. At the core of scientific work lie replicability and reproducibility. Even if different scientific communities use these terms differently, the recognition that these aspects need more attention is commonly shared and individual communities can learn a lot from each other. Networking is therefore of great importance. The newly founded initiative German Reproducibility Network (GRN) wants to be a platform for such networking and targets all of the above initiatives. GRN is embedded in a growing network of similar initiatives, e.g. in the UK, Switzerland and Australia. Its goals include Support of local open science groups Connecting local or topic-centered initiatives for the exchange of experiences Attracting facilities for the goals of Open Science Cultivate contacts to funding organizations, publishers and other actors in the scientific landscape In particular, the GRN aims to promote the dissemination of best practices through various formats of further education, in order to sensitize particularly early career researchers to the topic. By providing a platform for networking, local and domain-specific groups should be able to learn from one another, strengthen one another, and shape policies at a local level. We present the GRN in order to address the existing local initiatives and to win them for membership in the GRN or sibling networks in other countries.

Description: Research software plays a crucial role in scientific working process. The talk relates the topic to the new rules for good scientific practice and the current developments in Open Science. In addition, the importance of research software in the context of the digitization strategy of Helmholtz association is considered.

Description: There is an increasing public interest in sea ice information from both Polar Regions, which requires up-to-date background information and data sets at different levels for various target groups. In order to serve this interest and need, seaiceportal.de (originally: meereisportal.de) was developed as a comprehensive German knowledge platform on sea ice and its snow cover in the Arctic and Antarctic. It was launched in April 2013. Since then, the content and selection of data sets increased and the data portal received increasing attention, also from the international science community. Meanwhile, we are providing near-real time and archive data of many key parameters of sea ice and its snow cover. The data sets result from measurements acquired by various platforms as well as numerical simulations. Satellite observations of sea ice concentration, freeboard, thickness and drift are available as gridded data sets. Sea ice and snow temperatures and thickness as well as atmospheric parameters are available from autonomous platforms (buoys). Additional ship observations, ice station measurements, and mooring time series are compiled as data collections over the last decade. In parallel, we are continuously extending our meta-data and uncertainty information for all data sets. In addition to the data portal, seaiceportal.de provides general comprehensive background information on sea ice and snow as well as expert statements on recent observations and developments. This content is mostly in German in order to complement the various existing international sites for the German speaking public. We will present the portal, its content and function, but we are also asking for direct user feedback.

Description: These recommendations describe challenges relating to research software and provide recommendations for the development, use and provision of this type of software. The relevance of research software to modern research should be clearly underlined, especially in the context of political debate on digital transformation in the sciences and humanities. This document was prepared by the Research Software Working Group, established in 2016, within the Alliance initiative.