ACM Digital Library-Curation Platform Integrations

ACM encourages all authors to submit a snapshot of their software and data sets for permanent archiving in the ACM DL. At the same time, ACM has begun building integrations with external software curation platforms where authors can create, evolve, and modify their projects.

A study funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation was undertaken to understand the landscape of the emerging platforms and how they might be integrated with the ACM Digital Library (DL). The use cases considered three typical situations:

  1. Repeating algorithmic comparisons with different datasets
  2. Sharing and modifying experiments as interactive content
  3. Deriving a new software artifact from an existing one

Although the use cases do not cover all situations or exhaust the capabilities of each of the platforms, they do provide insight into best practices for authors, reviewers and publishers to create, evaluate and deploy content from active curation. And most important, they demonstrate the potential of reproducible experiments with their artifacts when integrated with the published research.

Pilot integration was done for the three use cases above which employed different exemplar platforms and papers. Video demonstrations (above) were made for the pilots to illustrate active digital curation and to seek the feedback of the broader computer science and engineering community.

Reproducibility of Results in the ACM DL

There is a growing need for access to artifacts and experiments associated with scholarly publications in computer science and engineering. To serve this need, new “active digital curation” platforms are emerging that provide support to create and deliver artifacts and experiments as dynamic, interactive content, which can be associated with scientific articles. Integrating these platforms with publications has the potential to radically change the processes and mechanisms for scholarly dissemination.