Open Science Award

ECMLPKDD 2013 will promote openness in science by awarding an Open Science Award to authors that provide the most open access to software and data used in papers published at the conference.

Traditionally, a submission to a conference consists of a paper, and not of software and data. This can unnecessarily limit the impact of scientific research. ECMLPKDD 2013 wishes to promote reusability of software and data, as well as to improve reproducibility of scientific results.

We will do this as follows:

  • Authors of accepted papers are invited to provide a website that gives access to data and software used in the paper. The ECMLPKDD website will provide links to these websites to increase their visibility.
  • The information available on each website will be evaluated by an award committee. The website that best meets the criteria listed below, will receive an award at the ECMLPKDD 2013 award ceremony.

Whereas it is not mandatory that all papers participate in the Open Science Award, all are encouraged to do so. Only authors of accepted papers can participate; papers in both the journal track and the proceedings track are eligible.

Criteria

Authors are encouraged to make software and data available in an open and accessible manner. The following criteria will be taken into account during the evaluation:

  • the availability of software and source code (eg., implementations of algorithms developed within the paper, but also scripts to run alternative systems with the exact parameter settings used in the paper)
  • available documentation for installing and using software
  • ease of installation and use
  • documentation of the functionality of the software; documentation generated from the code, e.g. with doxygen, is encouraged, as well as comments within the code
  • the implementation effort required to build the software
  • the availability and documentation of the data used
  • the openness of the license used for the software and data

The winner is not expected to satisfy all these criteria. All submissions are free to focus on a subset. None of the criteria is a goal by itself. The criteria are important to the extent that they support  openness and sharing of scientific results.

Submission instructions

The deadline for submissions is July 26, 2013 August 2, 2013.

The authors should send a mail to openscience@ecmlpkdd2013.org which includes the following information:

  • The number of the paper in which the software and/or data was used
  • Main developer(s) of the implementation(s)
  • A link to a website (or multiple links to websites) where the source code, datasets and documentation are available
  • If applicable, references to the systems/libraries/implementations on which the software is based
  • If applicable, references to the origin of datasets

The authors are free to decide where they host their software and/or data. Submitting data to an open data repository is encouraged; in this case, a link to the data repository may be provided as well.

 

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