Opening Up: The Benefits of Adopting Open Science Principles in a Large Multi-Institutional Modeling Project

The Integrated Multisector, Multiscale Modeling (IM3) project, which includes collaborators from five U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratories and ten universities, couples high-resolution, physics- and process-based models to resolve key interactions and feedbacks across human and natural systems. In addition to cutting-edge basic science research, IM3 is committed to adopting the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles for managing scientific data and using open-source models. We will discuss our evolution over the past three years as a project along these lines and the roadblocks we have overcome such as serving a geographically- and institutionally-distributed team, balancing flexibility and ease of implementation, and deciding when and how to make data and code open throughout the research project lifecycle. To facilitate transparency in our research, we have started using meta-repositories (e.g., https://github.com/IMMM-SFA/burleyson-etal_2020_energy) to create landing pages where all of the data, software, and workflows associated with our peer-reviewed publications can be accessed from a single location. We also share our approach to FAIR data with the broader community through a MultiSector Dynamics (MSD) community of practice.