The Heliocentric Model of Open Science Documentation Understanding Scientific Information Stewardship Top-Down and Bottom-Up v6 29NOV2024 Monica Gonzalez-Marquez, et al*, Open Science Advocate mg246@cornell.edu DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14242541 1. Do away with a paper-centric model of documentation 2. Return to first principles and allow Scientific Questions and their constraints to guide documentation structure. 3. For optimal communication, allow the labor of the scientific process to determine: a. What needs to be documented b. How it should be documented Golden Rule: Documentation is for communication with humans The documentation tools we build are meant to serve the components of the scientific process, not exist independently: Data without its context is meaningless. Credit: T Šimko. METHODS METHODS *paper with collaborators forthcoming Scientific documentation should not be constrained by the limits of the out-of-date research article. Scientific information takes make shapes and model media should be used to accommodate it. The purpose of documentation is to Communicate our science to current and Future generations. Science is a verb, it is labor. RDM should be grounded in preserving Information about the labor that produced the data, as well as the data itself. Instead of allowing the paper and publishing constraints to dictate what information is documented for posterity and how, Helio positions the research question at the helm of record-keeping. It is in turn, constrained by the resources needed to ask the question. These two layers are constrained by the communicative drive: science that is not communicated in usable fashion, may as well not exist. It is also a complete waste of resources, and thus not sustainable. The methods satellite below shows some of the labor involved in completing the methods component of a human science study. These details are indispensable to understanding how to interpret and potentially reproduce a study. They are also indispensable to accurate peer review. Current documentation practices either grossly under-describe or completely omit these needed details. Helio provides needed structure to Open Science efforts by helping map tools, infrastructure and other resources directly to components of the scientific process, thus reframing them as being directly at the service of documenting complete research processes for posterity. Helio uses labor as the basic unit to breakdown scientific processes for documentation. These satellites are not mapped to sections in a paper but to components of scientific processes, as instantiations of the scientific method, and as the labor needed to complete them. This presupposes that scientific processes and their components will vary according to discipline. This model is an analogy of the original planetary model transition process. Just as it was an error to position the Earth at the center, it has been an error to place the paper at the helm of scientific documentation. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated a machine learning algorithm might be or what A.I. can do, the ultimate interpreters of scientific information will always be people. Hence, we must document so that information is usable and understandable by people. ©Inês Silva for all figures unless otherwise noted The paper is demoted to become the narrative. In this way it assumes the role it has in practice which is to function as an extended abstract with links to detailed, usable descriptions of the labor and labor products of the scientific process.