(Draft) Open Data and Science Practices in MSR
A short compendium of the MSR conference different Call for Papers and guidelines for Open Data and Science practices.
The call for tools in MSR began in 2006, with a twist in that the tools were all required to be applied to a specific dataset provided by the conference:
In addition to the MSR paper track we invite researchers or research groups to participate in the MSR Challenge to apply their prototype mining tools on two common case studies that can be seen as OSS mining benchmarks.
The call for data papers, particularly unique in conferences, would begin much later, in 2013:
We want to encourage researchers to share their data. Data papers should describe data sets curated by their authors and made available to others. They are expected to be at most 4 pages long and should address the following: description of the data, including its source; methodology used to gather it; description of the schema used to store it, and any limitations and/or challenges of this data set. The data should be made available at the time of submission of the paper for review, but will be considered confidential until publication of the paper. Further details about data papers are available on the conference website.
Finally, 2017 call for papers took both approaches one step further, encouraging (but not requiring) Open Science practices for all submissions:
MSR is experimenting with encouraging authors to use open science to make their research, data and dissemination accessible to anybody in the world with an Internet connection. Here follow our guidelines and recommendations for open access, open data and open source.
In short, Open Access guidelines encouraged the submission of publications pre-print to arXiv.org. Both Open Data and Open Source were also encouraged to be preserved in archives such as Zenodo and Figshare, the later indirectly via GitHub.
From 2018 call for papers and onwards, MSR added a FOSS Impact Paper Award, which “was granted to papers that show outstanding contributions to the FOSS community”, however the guidelines were no longer showcased on the conference website.
