Notebooks Now! The Future of Reproducible Research

Notebooks Now! The Future of Reproducible Research

In this paper, we introduce a new ambitious project led by AGU in collaboration with Wiley and Curvenote and a team of geoscientists, computer and data scientists. The project, aptly called Notebooks Now!, aims to develop an end-to-end workflow for the preparation, submission, peer-review and publication of Earth and space science papers, based on computational notebooks, specifically Jupyter Notebooks or R Markdown. The idea, first proposed by Dr. Peter Fox, Editor in Chief of Earth and Space Science from 2019 to early 2021, is to revolutionize the way data- and computation-rich scientific research is performed and published. The vision is to establish the computational notebook as the centerpiece of the scientific work, around which the manuscript is then written. In this model, the notebook is the primary publication, accompanied by a static traditional paper as the enduring archive. Advantages of this model include: ease of editing of data and code during manuscript writing and revision; open access to the same by reviewers and readers; prompt reusability and repurposing of research outputs by other researchers; access to sophisticated computational tools by the global community; multiplier effect of the research. The model thus fulfills the findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable principles of scientific publishing, and commits to Open Science. This is part of AGU's strategic initiative to accelerate openly accessible scientific contributions to sustainable development.