Supporting sustainable process documentation

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a software design to greatly simplify the elicitation and management of process metadata for researchers. Detailed documentation of a research process not only aids in achieving reproducibility, but also increases usefulness of the documented work for others as a cornerstone of good scientific practice. However, in reality, time pressure together with the lack of simple documentation methods makes documenting workflows an arduous and often neglected task. Our method for a clean process documentation combines benefits of version control with integration into existing institutional infrastructure and a novel schema for describing process metadata.