PROFES has committed itself to foster open science practices to increase the accessibility, reproducibility, and replicability of our research outcomes. All research output should be accessible to the public and empirical studies should be reproducible. Please note that we are still experimenting with open science and strongly rely on your support and also feedback – in case of doubt, please ask.
Guidelines and Recommendations
PROFES asks all authors for the disclosure of data to the public (within the limits of existing non-disclosure agreements*). The rest of the guidelines are recommendations and not mandatory. Therefore, please note that the success of the open science initiative depends on the willingness (and possibilities) of authors to disclose their data and that all submissions will undergo the same review process independent of whether or not they disclose their analysis code or data.
Open Data and Open Source
Papers which rely on empirical data should disclose* the (anonymized and curated) data to increase reproducibility and replicability. Either:
- Archive their data on preserved archives such as zenodo.org and figshare.com, so that the data will receive a DOI and become citable.
- Personal or institutional websites, consumer cloud, or services such as Academia.edu and Researchgate.net are not archived and preserved digital repositories.
- Use the CC0 dedication (or the CC-BY 4.0 license) when publishing the data (automatic when using zenodo.org and figshare.com), as explained here.
- Different open licenses, if mandated by institutions or regulations, are also permitted.
Or: Self-archive their paper to make it open access (see below).
Similarly, we encourage authors to make their research software accessible as open source and citable.
We ask the authors to avoid putting the data/software on their own websites, or systems like Dropbox, version control systems (SVN, Git). Moreover, authors (or anybody else) should not have the ability to delete data once it is public. Simply use an archived only repository.
*Authors who cannot disclose industrial or otherwise non-public data, for instance due to non-disclosure agreements, are asked to please provide an explicit (short) statement in the paper.
Open Access
We encourage PROFES authors to self-archive their pre- and postprints in open, preserved repositories, such as arXiv.org. This is legal and allowed by all major publishers including Springer (granted in the copyright transfer agreement), and it lets anybody in the world reach your paper.
Note that you are not allowed to self-archive the PDF of the published article, that is the one you can find on SpringerLink. Only self-archive your own generated PDFs.
Note that you pay attention to the Springer self-archiving policies, which can be obtained here: https://www.springer.com/gp/open-access/authors-rights/self-archiving-policy/2124.