Principles

Purpose Statement

COSIMA exists to foster community and collaboration in ocean and sea ice modelling research and to provide an avenue for people’s efforts to have lasting impact while helping others move forward.

Code of Ethics

Four ethical principles form the foundational pillars of COSIMA.

Integrity, Trust, Openness, Fairness

all of which feed into and nurture our collaborative and community-spirit purpose.

We expect these principles to be honoured by everyone who participates or benefits from COSIMA. The fundamentals of each principle are outlined below. Everyone is expected to follow this code in spirit as much as in letter.

Integrity

Integrity is the soul of science; it takes a life-time to earn and a moment to lose. We demonstrate sound moral principles, always acting with honour and truthfulness. We are honest in presenting goals and intentions, in reporting methods and procedures, and in conveying interpretations.

Trust

Just as with integrity, trust is tough to earn yet easy to lose. COSIMA is a community built on trust and trust should underlie all of our practices.

An environment of trust and integrity allows members to

  • Feel safe to express new ideas, ideas others may disagree with, and ideas that may make them vulnerable;
  • Tolerate conflict enough to resolve it.

Openness

Open methods, open data, open collaborations, open communication.

COSIMA is committed to developing and sharing model configurations, model output, and model analyses. We believe that modern climate science cannot be separated from software. Science informs model development and model results push science forward. We equally value science and software–model development contributions.

We are committed to a spirit of receptiveness to input from and promote an expansive collaborative spirit in our undertaken research projects.

We are committed to having coherent and explicit communication between team members.

In pursuit of our scientific goals, COSIMA community members

  • Ensure research methods and results are open to scrutiny and debate.
  • Aim to work transparently and involve interested parties as early as possible.
  • Encourage a research culture that is innovative, open and transparent.
  • Declare any potential, perceived, or actual conflicts of interest.

Fairness

We are committed to objective, unbiased, inclusive and equitable actions. All members of the COSIMA community have a right to expect, and a duty to give fair treatment to others.

Collaboration – the backbone of it all

Collaboration underlies all of the above pillars. Collaboration nurtures a team spirit that enables new science. The group’s potential is not merely its sum of its individual’s potential; 1+1≠2 but it is much more! Collaboration reduces redundancy and improves the quality of our work. Collaboration allows for synergy to produce novel and unexpected science that pushes back the envelope of understanding. We celebrate collaboration, internally and externally.

“What we produce is a complex whole made of many parts, it is the sum of many dreams. Collaboration between teams that each have their own goal and vision is essential; for the whole to be more than the sum of its parts, each part must make an effort to understand the whole”
[Ubuntu Code of Conduct]

Code of Practice

Fictional examples go here:

If something bad happens, you can talk to any of the COSIMA co-chairs and we can put together an ethics committee to provide guidance. This can be confidential.

  1. [POSITIVE] Coral finds a bug in one of the COSIMA recipes. She doesn’t know how to fix it herself, but wants to alert others so they don’t use the incorrect code. Coral raises an issue on github to report the bug. Mariana sees the github issue, knows how to fix the bug, and submits a pull request to fix it. While Coral’s motivation was to help the community, she now also has some working code!
  1. [NEGATIVE] River is working on his PhD project using existing COSIMA model output. However, he didn’t add his project to the shared COSIMA project list to let others know what he is working on. A year later, Doris, a postdoc in COSIMA, starts working on a similar project to River using the same model output. When River gives a talk on his final project results at the COSIMA workshop, Doris realises that her work on a similar topic is now obsolete. She is upset that her hard work was a waste of time, even though she was careful to first check that there were no similar existing projects underway or already planned by other COSIMA members. 
  1. [POSITIVE] Yoko uses COSIMA model configurations and control run outputs to run their own perturbation simulations. Yoko documents their contribution using the metadata.yaml attribution statement.
    1. Inspired by COSIMA’s guiding principles of openness and fairness, Yoko shares the output so that others in the community can collaborate and benefit from their work
    2. Sharing output recognises that the simulations Yoko ran are built on COSIMA resources and that we all benefit from sharing broadly.
    3. Before joining COSIMA, Yoko had been worried that others would use their data and rush to beat them to publication, but the COSIMA community respects their contribution and supports Yoko to achieve their research goals.
  1. [NEGATIVE] Nixie uses model output and code from COSIMA recipes to do her analysis, but doesn’t engage with the COSIMA community. By not engaging with the COSIMA community, Nixie misses out on the opportunity to learn from others, and the community misses out on the opportunity to learn from Nixie’s experience.
    1. Great ways to engage are, for example:
      1. attend Thursday COSIMA meetings and annual COSIMA workshops;
      2. present your work in a Thursday COSIMA meeting;
      3. come to a hackathon and help improve the COSIMA recipes;
      4. report bugs on GitHub; and
      5. interact with the community on the hive by saying hello to other COSIMA folks, letting them know about your research, and asking and answering questions.
  1. [QUESTION] Sandy contributes to model development that leads to a stable model configuration that can be used for research. Guinevere uses this configuration as the basis for their simulations. Both Sandy and Guinevere document their contribution using the metadata.yaml attribution statement. Should Sandy be included as coauthor on research papers that build on this development? There are a few points worth considering in this discussion:
    1. COSIMA doesn’t have strict coauthorship rules. Instead we encourage open communication, inclusivity, and recognition of significant contributions.
    2. “Science ready” configurations require a significant amount of model development and tuning. COSIMA supports that this contribution be recognised.
  1. [POSITIVE] Supervisor Moana has a new student, Varuna, and shows him how to use COSIMA output and recipes. As part of this introduction to COSIMA, Moana tells Varuna about how to engage with the community, the importance of trying to give more than you take and shares the link to the COSIMA onboarding page.