Guardians 2023 Instructions

Scholarly Publishing

Guardians annual conferences on reproducibility, reliability, and integrity serve as an example context for the continuing development of the NPDS Cyberinfrastructure with PDP-DREAM Software and the PORTAL-DOORS Project with application to scholarly research publications and communications. Relevant background references include:

• A. Craig et al 2019, DREAM Principles and FAIR Metrics from the PORTAL-DOORS Project for the Semantic Web, DOI 10.1109/ECAI46879.2019.9042003
• S. K. Taswell et al 2020, The Hitchhiker's Guide to Scholarly Research Integrity, DOI 10.1002/pra2.223
• A. Athreya et al 2020, The Essential Enquiry 'Equal or Equivalent Entities?' About Two Things as Same, Similar, Related, or Different, DOI 10.48085/PEDADC885
• S. K. Taswell et al 2021, Truth in Science, DOI 10.48085/M85EC99EE
• A. Craig et al 2022, Motivating and Maintaining Ethics, Equity, Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Expertise in Peer Review, DOI 10.48085/I5B147D9D

User Accounts

Research scholars who wish to participate in Guardians 2023 as either authors or reviewers should register a user account at Guardians.bhavi.us. All registered user accounts are assigned user aliases with random alphanumeric characters for the coded alias. Authors and reviewers remain de-identified during the manuscript review process. Note that user accounts are NOT shared between those for Guardians.BHAVI.us and those for www.BHAVI.us. If you wish to participate in online activities at both sites, then you should register a user account at each. Those at Guardians.BHAVI.us will be de-identified and aliased by default, whereas those at www.BHAVI.us will not. Instead, at www.BHAVI.us, users may choose their own alias with a preferred "display name" aka "screen name".

Author Reports

• There will be no registration, processing or publication fees charged to authors who submit their research reports, which if accepted for presentation at Guardians 2023, will be published in the IEEE Computer Society proceedings for the conference.
• Manuscripts may address any form of research from basic to applied science and medicine, from primary to secondary and tertiary research, from computational and quantitative to non-computational and qualitative, including literature reviews and meta-analyses, and across the entire spectrum of research including "bench-to-bedside" and clinical trials.
• Manuscripts may focus on open source software projects. Reports, analyses, and discussions of open source software projects will not be excluded from Guardians conferences!!!
• Literature reviews may be submitted as literature reviews without any new experiments reported with data and results.
• Opinion essays may be submitted as opinion essays without any new experiments reported with data and results.
• Manuscripts must be submitted with author names de-identified. Authors may use the simple phrase Anonymous Authors or any other preferred pseudonym that anonymizes the identity of the authors.
• Manuscripts may be any length from 1 page to 8 pages.
• Manuscripts must be submitted as *.pdf files prepared according to the IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Manuscript Formatting Guidelines (ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates).
• Authors should print and proofread their *.pdf files before submission, especially if the paper contains Asian/European language symbols (such as Chinese/Korean characters or English letters with European fonts).
• To submit reports, the corresponding author should first create a user account at Register User, complete their user profile at Change Profile, and consent to the author agreement at Add Author Role.
• After login to the user account, authors may submit their manuscripts at Submit Report.
• Access to the NPDS records for the Guardians2023 diristry will not be made public until after notification of review decisions on September 29.

Reviewer Discussions

• Novelty for the sake of novelty --- without supporting, enabling, and implementing reproducibility, reliability and integrity --- will not be considered an important criterion for selection of manuscripts by the program committee.
• Manuscripts will be evaluated for both the quality of the substantive reproducibility, reliability, and integrity of their experimental methods, data, and results and also the quality of the written description and report of those methods, data, and results.
• The program committee will favor those reports which demonstrate use of open software tools and methods, open data and results, rational inferences and conclusions, the presence of valid statistical analyses with hypothesis testing, and the absence of inherent self-contradictions, false equivalences, and other common fallacies in logical reasoning including the correlation/causation fallacy.
• Review criteria addressing experimental reproducibility and reliability do not apply in a direct manner to those papers considered opinion pieces which contain exclusively commentary and discussion of other published research literature. For these opinion essays, the logical reasoning criteria nevertheless do apply, but the experimental reproducibility and reliability criteria will not be required.
• To submit reviews of author reports, reviewers should create a user account at Register User
• After login to the user account, reviewers may submit their discussions of author reports at Submit Discussion.

Mentor Nominations

Guardians 2023 will offer cash prizes of $2500 for best papers by students in each of the 3 award categories:

• Reproducibility in Science and Medicine
• Reliability of Data and Algorithms for Knowledge Engineering and Computational Intelligence
• Integrity in Scholarly Research and Communications

Important Dates

• August 7 Fri Aug 18: report website opens for submissions
• September 4 Fri Sep 22: report website closes for submissions
• September 9 Sat Sep 23: report website opens for review discussions
• September 18 Fri Sep 29: authors notified of review decisions
• October 2 Fri Oct 6: report website closes for presentation versions
• October 9 Mon Oct 9: author presentations online at Guardians 2023