Lifecycle of figures in the IPCC Reports

Overview

Questions

• How do figures and figure submission requirements evolve throughout the cycle ?

Objectives

• Provide an overview of the figures life-cycle
• Describe evolving requirements for figure submission at the different draft versions

Figures evolve throughout the cycle. At each draft, new figures are created, some are discarded, or combined. At the end of the process, for the publication of the final draft, we wish to collect information on who created the figure, how, and using what data. Storing this information allows figure authors to get credit for their work, and allows other researchers to build on the work of the IPCC, in line with the best practices of open science.

The following lays out instructions for authors on how to organize figure information for submission to the TSU. Requirements are basic for the zero order draft, and increase in comprehensiveness as we move toward the Final Government Draft.

Zero Order Draft

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At this point, figures are mostly placeholders. Authors will for example suggest that “here should be a figure showing x,y,z”. There are no expectations of an actual figure being submitted at this stage.

First Order Draft

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TODO

Second Order Draft

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TODO

Final Government Draft

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Here we expect authors to submit - The figure itself - The data used to create the figure, and a reference for each dataset. Note that this data should be as close as possible to what is shown in the figure. If any analysis is required to translate original input data into figure-ready data, then authors should publish this data, get a DOI for it, and reference it in the figure metadata. See TODO. - The code used to create the figure based on the data provided. - Information on the author(s) of the figure - The proposed caption for the figure (???)

Figures adapted to different audiences

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Some key figures prepared by chapters are highlighted in the technical summary (TS), and later in the summary for policy makers (SPM). The intended audience for chapters, TS and SPM are of course different, and as a result, figures need to be adapted. This process will be facilitated by the data collection described above.

For example, the figures below show how chapter figure 6.3 and its underlying data was reused to create new figures for the technical summary (TS9), and later the SPM (SPM3).