White paper 13 - Publication, collation of results, presentation of audit trails

The publication, collation of results, presentation of audit trails white paper is now available for discussion. When making posts please remember to follow the house rules. Please also take time to read the full pdf before commenting and where possible refer to one or more of section titles, pages and line numbers to make it easy to cross-reference your comment with the document.

The recommendations are reproduced below:
1. When releasing data products, we would recommend that the following information must be provided about process of product generation, apart from data itself for the product to be considered an output of the project:
(1) A listing of the source data (databank version, stations, period) along with methodological rationale
(2) A file describing the quality control method and quality-control metadata flags;
(3) Homogeneous and / or gridded version of the data;
(4) Quality assessment report produced by running against at least a minimum set of the common test cases described in previous white papers;
(5) A published paper based on the data construction method and related products in the peer reviewed press in a journal recognized by ISI;
(6) Publication of an audit trail describing all intermediate processing steps and with a strong preference to inclusion of the source code used..

2. Datasets should be served or at the very least mirrored in a common format through a common portal akin to the CMIP portal to improve their utility.

3. Utility tools should be considered that manipulate these data in ways that end users wish.