Notebooks Now! is a community-driven effort led by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) under a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to define standards and workflows for publishing with Computational Notebooks and to enable Notebooks to become a recognized primary scholarly output and formally included in peer review and the scholarly record.
Computational notebooks are an exciting and powerful format for scholarly communication. They are already being widely used by researchers across disciplines for enabling, organizing and improving the efficiency of their work, and for sharing it informally. They integrate text, data, and a variety of code, as well as other linked notebooks, in an executable format, allowing new functionality in publishing, such as dynamic graphics and embedded simulations natively. Their structured format, open source code base, integration with open infrastructure, and growing tools and resources allows increased functionality for readers and further crowd-sourced innovation. Notebooks allow for greatly increased transparency and reproducibility of research results, and makes the reuse or research much easier and deeper. See Why Notebooks for more.
Read the paper where we introduce a new ambitious project led by AGU in collaboration with Wiley and Curvenote and a team of geoscientists, computer and data scientists.
The design of the Notebooks Now! approach leverages these advantages and also integrates notebooks into the existing scholarly publishing infrastructure. It also provides for all metadata and content to be machine readable, allows the notebook to be rendered in common publishing formats, and supports indexing the content in search engines and other services.
This website provides guidance for authors on how to prepare a notebook based manuscript and repository for the submission, review and publication system. The basic approach is scalable and can be adopted widely. Currently publication in AGU’s journal Earth and Space Science is supported. There is reference throughout this guide to existing community materials, existing or emerging standards, and tools to help with the workflow. This guide is not meant to be comprehensive in those aspects, however, instead be a curated community resource to point to best-practices and provide a guide to submitting research for AGU journals.
Our goal is to enable compatibility and interoperability with the scholarly publication ecosystem, as well as scalable peer-review and reading and computation of notebooks. Read more!