In the near future, scientists will routinely use new tools to develop research papers that will document all the associated digital objects (data, software, workflows, etc.). This will make science more open, promote fair credit of scientific contributions, and facilitate reproducibility.

The Scientific Papers of the Future (SPF) is an initiative to encourage geoscientists to publish papers together with the associated digital products of their research. This means that a paper would include: 1) Documentation of datasets, including descriptions, unique identifiers, and availability in public repositories; 2) Documentation of software, including pre-processing of data and visualization steps, described with metadata and with unique identifiers and pointers to public code repositories; 3) Documentation of the provenance and workflow for each figure or result.

The Scientific Paper of the Future concept was initiated by the EarthCube OntoSoft project as the Geoscience Papers of the Future, funded under the National Science Foundation awards ICER-1343800 and ICER-1440323. Exemplar papers and other information are available at that web site.

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