What is the scope for the contents in EarthArXiv

I think this (i.e. posting work on Figshare to get a formatted citation and a DOI)for blog-related content is an excellent suggestion!
If we all agree, I suggest that we complete the 'EarthArXiv Moderation and Terms of Use' (https://eartharxiv.github.io/moderation.html) under the "What does EarthArXiv not accept?"
"- Commentaries and opinion pieces (see Figshare as an alternative)

Is there a clear way to differentiate between commentaries and opinions and review articles, except for the quality, which we do not assess?

I suppose a review article should account for distinct viewpoints, which opinion pieces rarely do (i.e. they are proponents of a sole viewpoint)

Dear Bruce,

Why do you ask a question like this one while you know, at the same time, that there is no room for vetting out the "non science" submissions ? I simply didn't think about the time needed to moderate the contribution to EA, when I tried to formulate my point. To be sure. Did I got your subsequent messages right about moderation etc?

It makes sense, in second thoughts, to refer non scientific papers to other sites. At the same time I believe that it can be worthwhile to try a more integrated view as well. But that, in turn, will be a scientific paper if it is to be on the EA. Right?

I think that I have a lot of other things on my mind, like getting customers for my software, that require more urgent attention.

I wish you success with managing the EA.

Dr. Han Geurdes
Geurdes data science kvk64522202

Member of the UNGGIM Private Sector Network.
...................
Read my Clay millennium problem Navier Stokes solution:

Cogent Mathematics

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311835.2017.1284293

http://arxiv.org/abs/1703.05113

Read our solution of Bells theorem at:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00005

Read our relativistic quantum theory paper
10.1016/j.hedp.2017.12.004

Hi Han,
I do think we need to consider how EarthArXiv can handle contents that are not limited to the historical constraints that print journals had... so I believe the conversation is worthwhile. Discussions in the formation of EA included wanting to "disrupt" the current publishing constraints. It only occurred to me after my question that this would also add to the labor of the group vetting content. And, as Stephanie has reminded me, the Executive Council already has a position on this. This discussion has surfaced the idea of using some way of tagging non-traditional submissions. This notion may inform a solution in the future. cheers!

Interesting proposal. I guess people are still happy to cite ‘pers. comm.’ in their work in support of a statement. Why not an essay? Having said that, I hate and never cite ‘pers. comm.’, and always ask authors to remove them when reviewing. It could literally be, and typically is, reflective of a comment someone once made to someone in a bar...

Thanks Bruce.

Sorry, I was tired and somewhat grumpy. Sorry again...

Dr. Han Geurdes
Geurdes data science kvk64522202

Member of the UNGGIM Private Sector Network.
...................
Read my Clay millennium problem Navier Stokes solution:

Cogent Mathematics

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311835.2017.1284293

http://arxiv.org/abs/1703.05113

Read our solution of Bells theorem at:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00005

Read our relativistic quantum theory paper
10.1016/j.hedp.2017.12.004

I kind of like this idea, in terms of widening out the scope - there are many editorials or opinion pieces that are short, but useful but all too often pay-walled themselves. But I totally appreciate the amount of extra work that might come with pre-screening processes. Also, an interesting discussion could even bring people to EA who might not otherwise have considered using the site.

The idea was mentioned about tagging such pieces so that they were identifiably different from more conventional research pieces, which is good.

Another idea might be to, in the future, host an accompanying blog alongside EA, where opinion pieces can be posted, reviews of recent pre/post prints can be made etc. The example I was thinking about was http://www.realclimate.org/ but I didn't know if such a resource existed for the Earth Scientists.

For me the additional work for handling more informal contributions is not a particularly good argument. If EarthArXiv becomes a success and most of the Earth Science manuscripts are uploaded here we would have magnitudes more work, we can handle a few percent informal contributions more. At the moment the onboarding is done by Chris and apparently it is not worth the trouble of setting up a formal system with clear criteria and a group where experts in the field judge the manuscripts. (I would be happy to do (observational) climatology.)

RealClimate is a really good blog and worth mimicking in other Earth sciences. If we can somehow stimulate that that would be valuable. I am not sure whether we should do that under the brand of EarthArXiv.

Due to the comment of @sgirardclos I (re)discovered that we have a homepage (with terms and references), including an empty blog.
https://eartharxiv.github.io/index.html

The current first page of EarthArXiv is not a good entry point for new people, it does not explain anything. https://eartharxiv.org/
The EarthArXiv page should prominently link to our Github page and the link from Github to the ArXiv could also be more prominent.

Even better would be to merge the two pages: the Earth ArXiv search box put on the first page of our Github homepage and that merged page could be hosted at EarthArXiv.org. A ticker with new articles on the first page would be wonderful to demonstrate that we are alive.

It would be good to use the blog on our homepage for communication with our users. This channel is not the best way for that, too much detail and more complicated to reply.

Hi all. In the following notes, we suggest our users to host their research files and related materials in OSF repository. If they have a draft of manuscript as a result, they could upload the file to the repository and connect it as a preprint to their choice of preprint server. If the server is not OSF preprint family, then they should put the link back to the original repository to direct readers to the original data and supporting materials.

So, where have we got to with this? Personally, I like the suggestion that something like FigShare, personal blogs, etc, might be a more appropriate venue for this type of material, even if it then is not discoverable within the OSF search framework. I also agree with the sentiments above that somehow protecting the EA 'brand' might be valuable. @bcaron: seeing as you raised this issue, how do you feel now? And those in support of hosting this type of material, would you like to mount further arguments? It's an interesting this to discuss/think about...!

Great discussion. Right now there is not a way to segment content within a single OSF-hosted preprint service to fulfill simultaneous use cases. Just to add that the use case described for figshare might be better served by submitting to the generalist repository at OSF Preprints at https://osf.io/preprints/submit. This is an un-moderated, all-discipline, repository that provides DOIs, citations etc.. The advantage being that if tagged, or submitted with an appropriate subject taxonomy, it would be discoverable alongside EarthArXiv content when searching at https://osf.io/preprints/discover

He’s good. Real good...

I really like this conversation. And with Loomio, we can come back to it later too, or at least find it and remember it. Blogs seem like edge cases we don't need to go into now (figshare is an easy current solution). Better to look at capabilities that OSF already has that can add value when someone uploads a pre- post-print. This will also help us differentiate our preprint service from non-OSF ones. These options can be opt-in capabilities, and help support new cultural practices that are not tied to old paper journal ones. @christopherjackson1 ... I'm good with the current guidelines, the Advisory Council did a great job.

It is very interesting that a recent editorial published by Science was echoed with the same mentality: "instead of weeding out, we should be weeding in.".

As a preprint repository, being open is not only about the inclusiveness of research content/ format but also the creativeness of scientific community.

In my mind, an acceptable submission for EarthArXiv would be legit, relevant to the geosciences borderline, and readable of decent clarity.

Apparently ESSOAr will start publishing peer reviewed Jupyter notebooks. On the face of it, I am interested.

I'm not really a 'keeping up with the Jones's' person, but it did get me thinking... what would the CDL framework need to publish non-PDF artifacts? Obviously, Jupyter notebooks could be one example, another could be RO-crates. What about a DOI which is a link to a manubot generated manuscript?

I find this interesting. Others? Thoughts?

One of the founding reasons for EarthArXiv was to open up new sharing capabilities not available from commercial publishers... so let's keep looking at where this can happen. (We are still getting the kinks out of a new platform, so nothing to do near-near term.

Thanks @brandon for the pointer! I think moving away from the PDF is a core challenge of scholarly communication, and it would be great to see EarthArXiv take a lead here, or pilot something. Similarly to arXiv who partner with Papers With Code for machine learning preprints.

My spontaneous suggestion would be to archive Binder-ready repositories, so I can open a Jupyter Notebook or R Studio workflow based on an EarthArXiv DOI. An important advantage of this would be separation of expertise and resources, i.e., EarthArXiv probably does not want to get into the infrastructure game and provide computing power.

Papers with Code just announced an expansion to other disciplines:
https://twitter.com/paperswithcode/status/1337044995686207490?s=21

Thanks for the links, @Daniel Nüst & @Evan Goldstein. Those are promising developments!

Personally I am in favor of casting a wide net, as long as it is helpful for the scientific community I would prefer us to do it.

One reason we have the repositories is to get rid of the stranglehold of the legacy publishers on science and how we do science. One of the innovations the publishers and their monopoly on (bad) research assessment (publish or perish) block is expanding to more publication types, not only notebooks, but also partial publication (just a hypothesis, or just an analysis; see e.g. Octopus), mini-publications, data-publications, analysis software, software platforms, outreach activities, ...

All good idea, but we need to work a little on some of the basic front-end for now. But longer-term, sure!