The Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System (CSDMS), an international; organization of over 1700 members, has a mission to enable model use and; development for research in earth surface processes. CSDMS strives to; expand the use of quantitative modeling techniques, promotes best; practices in coding, and advocates for the use of open-source software.; As a service for its members, the CSDMS Integration Facility (IF); maintains a code repository for numerical models. The CSDMS Model; Repository, initialized in 2009, currently holds over 300 open source; models and tools. To submit code to the Repository, a community member; completes an online form, providing metadata for their code and; selecting an open source license. In return for the code contribution,; CSDMS provides a home for the model on its publicly accessible site. The; model page is initially populated with the metadata provided by the; author, but it can be edited and expanded to include documentation,; examples, references, and graphics. If the code is available on a public; repository, such as GitHub, a link to it is provided from the; Repository; otherwise, the code is added to the Repository’s GitHub; repository. The version of the code submitted to the Repository is; assigned a DOI, making it citable. A QR code, suitable for display on a; conference poster, is also created. Finally, the CSDMS IF has devised a; model h-index, which gives a measure of a model’s visibility through; journal citations. By submitting code to the CSDMS Model Repository, a; model developer gets visibility, findability, accessibility, storage,; and preservation for their model code. CSDMS gets a library of open; source models that can be used for research. This can help accelerate; science, since it’s often easier to use or modify an existing model than; it is to start from scratch. The Repository also helps prevent model; codes from going “dark” and being forgotten. Above all, the Repository; serves the ethos of community modeling promoted by CSDMS.
