The building blocks of research are developing at an unprecedented pace. Data collection, analysis, interpretation, presentation, review, and publication take place completely on computers. The final product often is still a static document with only limited links to the underlying digital material, making transparency and reproducibility a challenge. In this work we apply the mechanism of badges to provide prominent connections to underlying analyses environments and important (meta-)data to readers of scholarly publications in geospatial data science. An API specification and implementation for a badge server provide extended and regular badges. The badges leverage recognition value for executability, licensing, spatial extent, and peer-review metadata – base information which either is or should be made available. We show a client-side integration method across many third-party platforms that allows evaluation of badges in realistic scenarios. The server and client enable an independent spreading of badges. The open source publication of all used software enables reproducibility and extensibility. The badges show potential to enhance interaction with scholarly works and should be evaluated with academic users in the future.
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