Open Practices

Visualization research is better communicated and acted on if it is freely accessible to the research community, practitioners, and the general public. As a community, there are several steps we can take to help ensure that research presented at VIS is (1) reproducible, (2) replicable, and (3) extensible by future researchers. As such, the Open Practices Committee for IEEE VIS 2022 is providing a set of requirements and recommendations for authors of accepted VIS papers. Note that the recommendations are only suggestions which authors can optionally follow to increase the long-term impact and usefulness of their work.

This page covers:

Requirement 1/1—Ensure you are compliant with Plan S

Camera-ready checklist:

  1. Tell us on the camera-ready submission form whether you believe that your paper is covered under Plan S and the associated funding or research institution. We will follow up with you individually with options and next steps to ensure your publication can appear in VIS.

More details:

Plan S is an Open Access initiative that was started in 2018. Specific funding and research institutions require work funded by them be published in open repositories or in journals that provide free access to manuscripts. In part, authors covered by Plan S must make their accepted manuscript available for free and published under an Open License (such as CC-BY).

The policy at IEEE for accommodating authors whose papers are covered under Plan S is currently evolving. At present, IEEE works with authors’ constraints on a case-by-case basis.

IEEE VIS is committed to helping any author affected by Plan S find an accommodation so that their work can appear at VIS and on IEEE Xplore.

Please see our blog post on Publishing papers covered under Plan S for details.

Recommendation 1/2—Upload a preprint to a free and open repository

Camera-ready checklist:

  1. Post a preprint version of your paper to a free and open access repository (e.g. arXiv) before the camera-ready deadline. We have several tutorials you can follow.

  2. On the Author Submission Portal provided by IEEE in the final stages of publication, enter either:

    • the URL that points to the preprint version of your article in the open access repository

    OR

    • a reason why you cannot share the paper on an approved open access repository.

More details:

VIS authors have the right to post the final preprint version of their accepted article to an open access repository before the print deadline. We recommend that authors exercise this right, as the audience of your work is improved if you post the final version of your accepted paper to a reliable open access repository. Research hidden behind a paywall is inaccessible to many readers.

Please review the Open Access Preprint Guide and FAQ, in which we provide:

We also provided several tutorials you can follow on how to post preprints on arXiv.

Recommendation 2/2—Upload supplemental material to a free, open, and long-term archive

Note: each of these recommendations on the checklist are just that—recommendations. Following ANY of them, even if you do not follow them all, can improve the long-term value of your research to the community and the health of our field.

Camera-ready checklist:

  1. Upload all supplemental materials required to reproduce the results in the paper to both
    1. IEEE using the Author Submission Portal.
    2. A free, reliable, and long-term archive—e.g. OSF.io.

    Examples of what materials we recommend including and how are described in the supplemental material FAQ.

  2. Include sufficient documentation so that your work can be easily used or extended by future researchers and practitioners.
  3. Release supplemental materials under a license that permits re-use by future researchers and practitioners—e.g. Apache License 2.0 for code and CC BY 4.0 for other materials.

More details:

The VIS community needs to take additional steps to help ensure that research presented at VIS is (1) reproducible, (2) replicable, and (3) extensible by future researchers. As such, the Open Practices Committee for IEEE VIS 2022 has provided these recommendations for supplemental materials that should be included with each paper.

To provide some background on this initiative, the 2016 IEEE Workshop on the Future of Research Curation and Research Reproducibility, at which IEEE employees were heavily represented, determined that:

  1. encouraging reproducibility and better curation of supplemental materials will lead to faster and more efficient science and
  2. better curation can lead to faster commercialization and innovation.

The workshop’s report recommended that research communities encourage reproducible content and set standards for it. The report argued:

  • Research artifacts should be storable, discoverable, and citable to be reused and so their creation is incentivized.
  • Code must be supplemented by documentation sufficient to run it (e.g,. recreate runtime environments, virtual environments).
  • Data must be supplemented by a description of how it was produced and how to interpret it.

Please see also the supplemental material FAQ, in which we answer the following questions:

Questions, comments, concerns?

If you have any questions or concerns related to this page or open practices, please contact the Open Practice chairs: open_practices@ieeevis.org.