Enforcing public data archiving policies in academic publishing: A study of ecology journals

To improve the quality and efficiency of research, groups within the scientific community seek to exploit the value of data sharing. Funders, institutions, and specialist organizations are developing and implementing strategies to encourage or mandate data sharing within and across disciplines, with varying degrees of success. Academic journals in ecology and evolution have adopted several types of public data archiving policies requiring authors to make data underlying scholarly manuscripts freely available. Yet anecdotes from the community and studies evaluating data availability suggest that these policies have not obtained the desired effects, both in terms of quantity and quality of available datasets. We conducted a qualitative, interview-based study with journal editorial staff and other stakeholders in the academic publishing process to examine how journals enforce data archiving policies. We specifically sought to establish who editors and other stakeholders perceive as responsible for ensuring data completeness and quality in the peer review process. Our analysis revealed little consensus with regard to how data archiving policies should be enforced and who should hold authors accountable for dataset submissions. Themes in interviewee responses included hopefulness that reviewers would take the initiative to review datasets and trust in authors to ensure the completeness and quality of their datasets. We highlight problematic aspects of these thematic responses and offer potential starting points for improvement of the public data archiving process.Comment: 35 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl

How Much is the Whole Really More than the Sum of its Parts? 1 + 1 = 2.5: Superlinear Productivity in Collective Group Actions

In a variety of open source software projects, we document a superlinear growth of production ($R \sim c^\beta$) as a function of the number of active developers $c$, with $\beta \simeq 4/3$ with large dispersions. For a typical project in this class, doubling of the group size multiplies typically the output by a factor $2^\beta=2.5$, explaining the title. This superlinear law is found to hold for group sizes ranging from 5 to a few hundred developers. We propose two classes of mechanisms, {\it interaction-based} and {\it large deviation}, along with a cascade model of productive activity, which unifies them. In this common framework, superlinear productivity requires that the involved social groups function at or close to criticality, in the sense of a subtle balance between order and disorder. We report the first empirical test of the renormalization of the exponent of the distribution of the sizes of first generation events into the renormalized exponent of the distribution of clusters resulting from the cascade of triggering over all generation in a critical branching process in the non-meanfield regime. Finally, we document a size effect in the strength and variability of the superlinear effect, with smaller groups exhibiting widely distributed superlinear exponents, some of them characterizing highly productive teams. In contrast, large groups tend to have a smaller superlinearity and less variability.Comment: 29 pages, 8 figure

Our Solar Siblings: A high school focused robotic telescope-based astronomy education project

In this paper, a robotic telescope-centric high-school level astronomy education project, Our Solar Siblings (OSS) is outlined. The project, an LCO official education partner, was formed as an institution-independent non-profit collaboration of volunteers officially in 2014, although the first version of the curriculum materials and approach was initially first designed in 2010. We outline the five goals of the project and the three approaches (formal classroom, independent student research and providing support to similar endeavours) we implement to try and achieve these goals. The curriculum materials, a central part of the project, are outlined as are their connections to various curriculum. The independent research project aspect and recent activity is presented. The article concludes with a brief update on the OSS evaluation which drives the educational design and the project’s future directions as of 2017

Constructing Temporal Networks of OSS Programming Language Ecosystems

One of the primary factors that encourage developers to contribute to open source software (OSS) projects is the collaborative nature of OSS development. However, the collaborative structure of these communities largely remains unclear, partly due to the enormous scale of data to be gathered, processed, and analyzed. In this work, we utilize the World Of Code dataset, which contains commit activity data for millions of OSS projects, to build collaboration networks for ten popular programming language ecosystems, containing in total over 290M commits across over 18M projects. We build a collaboration graph representation for each language ecosystem, having authors and projects as nodes, which enables various forms of social network analysis on the scale of language ecosystems. Moreover, we capture the information on the ecosystems' evolution by slicing each network into 30 historical snapshots. Additionally, we calculate multiple collaboration metrics that characterize the ecosystems' states. We make the resulting dataset publicly available, including the constructed graphs and the pipeline enabling the analysis of more ecosystems.Comment: Accepted to SANER 202

The role of SPICA-like missions and the Origins Space Telescope in the quest for heavily obscured AGN and synergies with Athena

In the BH-galaxy co-evolution framework, most of the star-formation (SF) and the black hole (BH) accretion is expected to take place in highly obscured conditions. Thus, obscured AGN are difficult to identify in optical or X-ray bands, but shine bright in the IR. Moreover, X-ray background (XRB) synthesis models predict that a large fraction of the yet-unresolved XRB is due to the most obscured (Compton thick, CT) of these AGN. In this work, we investigate the synergies between putative IR missions (using SPICA, proposed for ESA/M5 but withdrawn in October 2020, and Origins Space Telescope, OST, as `templates') and the X-ray mission Athena, which should fly in early 2030s, in detecting and characterizing AGN, with a particular focus on the most obscured ones. Using an XRB synthesis model, we estimated the number of AGN and the number of those which will be detected in the X-rays. For each AGN we associated an optical-to-FIR SED from observed AGN with both X-ray data and SED decomposition, and used these SEDs to check if the AGN will be detected by SPICA-like or OST at IR wavelengths. We expect that, with the deepest Athena and SPICA-like (or OST) surveys, we will be able to detect in the IR more than $90\,\%$ of all the AGN (down to L$_{2-10\text{keV}} \sim 10^{42}\,$erg/s and up to $z \sim 10$) predicted by XRB synthesis modeling, and we will detect at least half of them in the X-rays. Athena will be extremely powerful in detecting and discerning moderate- and high-luminosity AGN. We find that the most obscured and elusive CT-AGN will be exquisitely sampled by SPICA-like mission or OST and that Athena will allow a fine characterization of the most-luminous ones. This will provide a significant step forward in the process of placing stronger constraints on the yet-unresolved XRB and investigating the BH accretion rate evolution up to very high redshift ($z \ge 4$).Comment: Accepted for publication in PAS

The science case and mission concept for the Single Aperture Far-Infrared (SAFIR) Observatory

SAFIR is a large (10 m-class), cold (4-10 K) space telescope for wavelengths between 20 microns and 1 mm. It will provide sensitivity a factor of a hundred or more greater than that of Spitzer and Herschel, leveraging their capabilities and building on their scientific legacies. Covering this scientifically critical wavelength regime, it will complement the expected wavelength performance of the future flagship endeavors JWST and ALMA. This vision mission will probe the origin of stars and galaxies in the early universe, and explore the formation of solar systems around nearby young stars. Endorsed as a priority by the Decadal Study and successive OSS roadmaps, SAFIR represents a huge science need that is matched by promising and innovative technologies that will allow us to satisfy it. In exercising those technologies it will create the path for future infrared missions. This paper reviews the scientific goals of the mission and promising approaches for its architecture, and considers remaining technological hurdles. We review how SAFIR responds to the scientific challenges in the OSS Strategic Plan, and how the observatory can be brought within technological reach