ESEC/FSE 2023
Sun 3 - Sat 9 December 2023 San Francisco, California, United States
ESEC/FSE 2023 (series) /

Open Science PolicyESEC/FSE 2023

ESEC/FSE 2023 adheres to the ACM SIGSOFT open science policies. The text below is based on v0.9.9 of these policies.

Open science policies

Openness in science is key to fostering progress via transparency and availability of all outputs produced at each investigative steps. Transparency and availability of research outputs allow better reproducibility, replicability of quantitative studies and recoverability of qualitative studies. Open science builds the core for excellence in evidence-based research.

As an internationally renowned forum for researchers, practitioners, and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences, and challenges in the field of software engineering, ESEC/FSE 2023 has decided to actively support setting standards for how we conduct this kind of research.

To this end, we have explicitly committed ourselves to foster openness to our research outcomes. In particular, we support the adoption of open data and open source principles. We encourage all contributing authors to disclose the (anonymized and curated) data to increase reproducibility, replicability, and/or recoverability of the studies.

Principles

Research output should be publicly and freely accessible by anyone, permanently.

Artifacts related to a study (which include, but are not limited to, raw and transformed data, extended proofs, appendices, analysis scripts, software, virtual machines and containers, and qualitative codebooks) and the paper itself should, in principle, be made available on the Internet:

  1. without any barrier (e.g., paywalls, registration forms, request mechanisms),
  2. under a proper open licence that specifies purposes for re-use and repurposing,
  3. properly archived and preserved,

provided that there are no ethical, legal, technical, economic, or sensible barriers preventing the disclosure.

Open artefacts

Fostering artefacts as open data and open source should be done as:

  • Archived on preserved digital repositories that assign a DOI for artifacts, such as zenodo.org and figshare.com.
  • GitHub, GitLab, and similar services for version control systems do not offer properly archived and preserved data.
  • Personal or institutional websites, consumer cloud storage such as Dropbox, or services such as Academia.edu and Researchgate.net do not provide properly archived and preserved data.
  • Released under a proper open data licence such as the CC0 dedication or the CC-BY 4.0 licence when publishing the data.
  • Software can be released under an open source licence.
  • Different open licences, if mandated by institutions or regulations, are also permitted.

We encourage authors to make artefacts available upon submission (either privately or publicly) and upon acceptance (publicly).

Supporting statement

We ask authors to provide a supporting statement on the replication package availability (or lack thereof) in their submitted papers in a section named Data Availability after the Conclusion section.

Authors who cannot disclose data or artefacts for the reasons stated in the principles of the policies should provide a short statement in their submitted papers in a section named Data Availability after the Conclusion section.

Please note that the success of the open science initiative depends on the willingness (and possibilities) of authors to disclose their data and artefacts and that all submissions will undergo the same review process independent of whether they disclose their artefacts or data.

HOWTOs

Open Access

We encourage ESEC/FSE 2023 authors to self-archive their pre- and post-prints in open and preserved repositories. Self-archiving is legal and allowed by most publishers (granted in the copyright transfer agreement), and it will enable anybody in the world to reach papers barrier-free.

Upon acceptance to ESEC/FSE 2023, we encourage authors to revise their article according to the peers’ comments, generate a PDF version of it (post-print), and submit it to arXiv.org or their institutional repository.

Note: Authors are not allowed to self-archive the PDF of the published article as typeset by the publisher (a.k.a. “publisher proof,” “published paper,” “the digital library version”).

HOWTOs

A comprehensive FAQ for open access and self-archiving is available at https://avandeursen.com/2016/11/06/green-open-access-faq/.

Licence

Open science policies by Daniel Graziotin are licensed under CC0 1.0.