Jupyter Notebooks as a tool to increase Visibility of EarthCube Products

Abstract:

One of the challenges facing the EarthCube program has been disseminating developed software in order to increase community awareness of these available resources. Jupyter notebooks have emerged as a fairly widely adopted tool to document, demonstrate, and easily use wide ranging scientific tools and services. To increase awareness of and demonstrate EarthCube research software, and to simultaneously recruit the geoscience community to make their tools more accessible, EarthCube organized its first Call for Notebooks as part of its annual meeting in 2020, aiming to publish notebooks as fully citable, peer-reviewed publications. 21 notebooks were submitted, illustrating both scientific tools as well as science methods and results enabled by software tools from within the EarthCube community as well as externally developed tools adapted to support geoscience. These notebooks were reviewed by a panel made up of both scientists and software experts. This was a novel experience for the reviewers, as there are no established criteria for evaluating notebooks. Important factors considered included usage of software supporting geoscience, executability of the notebook, clarity of documentation and source citation, and utility of the notebook for research activities. Of the 21 submissions, 12 were accepted for publication with 5 orally presented and demonstrated at the conference. EarthCube is working with AGU to deposit the notebooks so that they are indexed within ESSOAr along with DOIs. Feedback from the EarthCube community meeting indicates that the notebook showcase was one of the most informative and successful sessions during the meeting. Based on this experience, the EarthCube office will be leveraging notebooks as a mechanism to make EarthCube products more visible and usable.