New Training Opportunities: FROGS: Facilitating Reproducible Open GeoScience

TL;DR: Thanks to funding from the NSF Geosciences Open Science Ecosystem (GEO OSE) program, LinkedEarth will offer several asynchronous and synchronous training activities in the area of open geoscientific research and publishing.

Publishing all of your research

Sharing research data, software, and workflows is fundamental to building a Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) open science ecosystem. Indeed, over the past decade, funders and publishers alike have introduced open science policies emphasizing reproducibility, recognizing increased frameworks that support the sharing of reproducible science products.

The next logical step is to promote these resources and train the community in their use. FROGS is a new initiative from LinkedEarth that links together science practice and publishing in a series of asynchronous and synchronous trainings. As such, it extends upon the training activities as shown below:

FROGS training activities will be headed by your friendly LinkedEarth leadership team (Nick McKay, Julien Emile-Geay, and myself) and David Edge, a data scientist at Northern Arizona University.

What should I be looking forward to in the next two years?

FROGS will comprise three main activites: LeapFROGS, PyRATES, and FAIRLeap, described below.

LeapFROGS is a free online platform that will curate lecture materials on science practice and publishing, along with interactive, self-graded exercises to create self-paced learning modules on various aspects of scientific research. The figure below shows an example of a training module.

The modules will include links to reference materials (in the image above, the modules provided by Project Pythia) together with exercises that test understandings of the concepts by filling in the blanks. Learners can get hints and detailed solutions.

Leveraging this platform, FROGS will be supporting three training events, detailed below. All training events will consist of an in-person hackathon followed by several weeks of practical exercises to incorporate the training into the participants’ research. We will also hold office hours during these weeks to help participants integrate these publishing principles into their research workflow.

PyRATES: Python and R Analysis of Time SerieS— June 3rd–6th, 2024, Marina del Rey, CA.

The first training activity consists of foundational training in Python and R for the geosciences, with an emphasis on time series analysis.

Intended audience: researchers with no to little experience in Python, R, and their associated science and publishing ecosystems.

Learning objectives: basics of scientific Python and/or R; use of open source geoscience software in research; statistical concepts in time series analysis; FAIR science publishing; paleoclimate data acumen.

Description: The workshop will consist of a blend of lectures and directed homework in the morning and afternoon session reserved for participants’ own research needs.

Completion: Submission of a notebook reproducing a study (or part thereof) in their field, published according to FAIR principles.

FAIRLeap: FAIR publishing in the geosciences — February 2025, Virtual

Intended audience: Researchers already engaged in geoscience research, preferably about to publish their first paper.

Learning objectives: Introduction to FAIR science publishing; basics of GitHub for software and project management; use of Docker, Binder, and myBinder for the sharing of reproducible and executable workflows.

Open Geoscience Hackathon — June 2025, Marina del Rey, CA.

Intended audience: Researchers interested in sharing their open science code in the form of an open source package, or in contributing to open source libraries.

Learning objectives: opening pull requests to contribute to open source projects; packaging software for distribution, including documentation; principles of unit tests and continuous integration (CI); publishing through a package manager.

What should I be looking for in the next few months?

• If you’re excited about PyRATES, our application will open mid-January!
• Discourse forum: The best place to ask questions and keep up with our activities in on our discourse forum. All you need to join is a GitHub username.
• AGU: If you are at AGU in December 2023, come talk to us about these opportunities!

FAQs

Well, not really asked… but anticipated.

Can I register for all three hackathons? Yes, you can apply to all three, depending on your research needs. Note that admission in one won’t guarantee admission in another. Similarly, you do not have to complete the first one to be accepted into the others.

Your mission is primarily about paleoclimate but I’m interested in another area of the geosciences, is FROGS still relevant to me? YES!!! From PyRATES to the Open Geoscience Hackathon, our primary goal is to help you integrate the publishing of your scientific study into your research. PyRATES will also be dealing with time series analysis, which is relevant to other areas of geoscience besides paleoclimate.

Are these training events free? Absolutely! In fact, for our training events in Marina del Rey, we have $2000/participant in travel support to make sure you can attend (you must be at a US-based institution for this support). All we ask in return is that you publish your science following FAIR principles.