Open Practices

Visualization research is better communicated and acted on if it is freely accessible to the research community, practitioners, and the general public. Likewise, there are steps as a community we can take to make sure that our work is transparent and that the claims in our papers are scrutinizable. Taken together, the suggestions on this page are aimed towards making work at VIS (1) reproducible, (2) replicable, and/or (3) extensible by future researchers. As such, the Open Practices Committee for IEEE VIS 2023 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
• Recommendation 1/2—Upload a preprint to a free and open repository
• Recommendation 2/2—Upload supplemental material to a free, open, and long-term archive
• Questions, comments, concerns?

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

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).

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

For full papers or other material appearing in TVCG: Accepted full papers will appear in a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Many IEEE Journals, including IEEE TVCG, have committed to becoming Transformative Journals with targets for gradual increases in open access content in order to comply with Plan S. Still, different funding agencies may have different requirements with respect to Open Access and Plan S, and making a particular work Open Access can incur additional costs.

For short papers, workshop papers, associated events, and other material appearing in IEEE XPlore: For short papers and other conference proceedings that do not appear in the TVCG Special Issue, but are included in IEEE Xplore, IEEE does not currently have an open access option. Solutions for different funding agency requirements can be made by contacting the IEEE copyright office at copyrights@ieee.org. Note that not all VIS workshops or associated events choose to include their proceedings in IEEE Xplore; consult with workshop or event organizers for more details on publication strategies.

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:

• Criteria for which repositories are findable, accessible, identifiable, and reliable.
• Instructions for sharing the preprint with VIS using the Author Submission Portal.
• A discussion of IEEE’s preprint policy and how it affects where you can share the paper and which version you can share.
• Notice that you can put your paper on a personal or institutional webpage, but that it may not meet Open Access criteria.
• An explanation of why Plan S does not affect preprints.

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, scrutinized, 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.

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

• Where should I upload supplemental material?
• What supplemental material should I share?
• What documentation should I include?
• Should I specify a license for supplemental materials and, if so, what license should I choose?

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.