CMIP6 > How To > Use Model Responsible Party Spreadsheets

Overview

A responsible party is a person or an organization involved with an activity of any sort.

The responsible parties for the CMIP6 models are documented and published using spreadsheets; one spreadsheet is used to collect responsible parties for all of an institute’s models . Below are instructions for collecting responsible parties using this spreadsheet.

1. Open the spreadsheet using Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice, or another spreadsheet editor.

The spreadsheet is found in the institutional GitHub repository in the cmip6/responsible_parties directory (see the layout of institutional GitHub repositories).

The spreadsheet is composed of three pages. The first page contains a link to these instructions.

The second page contains some example responsible parties to demonstrate how it works.

The third page is where you can enter your own responsible parties.

2. Create a responsible party

The third, “Responsible Parties” page contains an “Identifier” column for providing a unique identifier for the responsible party (see below) and other columns for describing the actual responsible party.

The responsible party must be described by

  • a name, and
  • whether or not the responsible party is a person (a value of 0) or an organization (a value of 1)

In addition, further details may be entered in any of the other columns.

As many responsible parties as you like can be described, each one on a separate row of the spreadsheet.

3. Provide an identifier for the responsible party

A responsible party is linked to model descriptions via the identifier provided in the “Identifier” column of the spreadsheet. This identifier can be anything you like, as long as no two identifiers are the same.

4. Use the identifiers to set responsible parties in the model spreadsheets

A responsible party is then linked to a model realm in the “Parties & Citations” page of a model realm spreadsheet. In this page you simply enter, under the “Responsible Parties” section, the identifier of the responsible party as defined in the responsible parties spreadsheet, and specify the role that the responsible party has (left-click in the required cell in the “Role” column to activate the pull-down menu button):

The same responsible party identifier can be be used in multiple model realm spreadsheets.

To provide another responsible party, copy the entire row by

  1. right-clicking over the row number (e.g. 9 in the above example) and selecting “Copy”,
  2. right-clicking again in the same place and inserting one row below, and
  3. pasting the copied row into the newly created row below.

The new row will have the all of the functionality of the original row, including the pull-down menu in the “Role” column.

5. Upload the responsible parties to the institutional GitHub repository

Upload the responsible parties, spreadsheet to the institutional GitHub repository.

When the model documents are created and entered into the ES-DOC archive, the requested responsible parties are automatically copied from the responsible parties spreadsheet into the published model descriptions.

Updating the responsible parties spreadsheet in the institutional GitHub repository will trigger an update to the published model documents, provided publication is set to “on” for that realm in the cmip6/model_publication.json file.