COSIMA ethics discussion 2025

COSIMA
,
1

COSIMA Ethics discussion

Notes from the COSIMA ethics discussion on 8 September 2025.

0. “Ariel”

Do we need a resolution strategy? Create a framework for dealing with these issues.
Add a point of contact for newcomers to reach out to.
For the framework, how to deal with anonymity. Perhaps Ariel can hand the issue off to a delegate. Informed consent at the point of potentially losing anonymity?
Add a subpoint that Ariel did use the attribution request field.
Add “And this is how it was resolved” section?
Suggestion for the community in general: don’t use the royal we; be specific about who ran the simulations.
Add that it was done unintentionally.
Add some examples of what attribution may look like. E.g. avoid “we” and “our”. Possibly add specific lines to the acknowledgements.

1. “Coral”

Change hyperlink to “new issue” page.
Change to “Coral wondered if something wasn’t working, so raised a question on the forum.” Someone responds to say, “yes, this is a bug.”
Add an issue template. “Raising an issue doesn’t mean there’s definitely a problem - it’s a way to ask questions.”
Guidance for when to use GitHub vs the Hive Forum. On the Getting Involved page talk about when to raise an issue vs start a hive post.

2. “River”

Institute a one minute announcement at the start of a COSIMA Thursday meeting when someone starts a project and updates the spreadsheet?
Project spreadsheet is hard to find?
Burden on the supervisors to keep the spreadsheet updated.
Add to the “Getting involved” page. :white_check_mark:
Possible integration to get a notification on the forum. new thread? Post to a particular thread?
Add new sheet for finished projects. Move the entries over once it’s done.
Add a “status” column?

3. “Yoko”

change to “documents contribution and expectations for attribution in metadata.yml”
are people using the metadat.yml? Or even know about it?
make the statements more visible. Add to quarterly COSIMA rotation.
Add that Yoko shared the configurations so that others could use them.
would it be reasonable to put an embargo? Probably, depending on length of time.

6. “Guinevere”

Potentially add some extra info as dot points below, e.g. the amount of time, software contributions, other ways to recognise contributions.

7. “Sandy”

Rename onboarding page to cosima “getting involved” page. :white_check_mark:
Could add some of the other good things that COSIMA does.

Overall:

Suggestion remove positive vs negative labels, and talk about how it was resolved.
Move “talk to COSIMA co-chairs” ABOVE the fictional examples.
Make it a hyperlink to the co-chairs. :white_check_mark:
Should the example acknowledgements prompt people to include who actually ran the simulations?
How do we promote this to people who are on the periphery of COSIMA?
Have some text come up when people load data from the intake catalogue, possibly as a “warning”. Alternatively have clear expectations before joining the various data projects.
DOIs for datasets, “COSIMA technical reports”, or something similar. Make it easier to get a citeable object.

2

This now needs adding in to update the ethics website? Who’s doing that?

3

Only the second bit of this is done.

4

Thanks @cbull. I’ve edited the post to split those.

5

I think adding metadata to simulation outputs would be a good way to address the points below. IMOS, for example, includes fields like authors, acknowledgment, contact information, etc. when you download data from their site.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I think it would be great if a workshop about metadata could be organised. Perhaps a template with core and suggested fields could be shared to make adoption easier.