Dear authors,

We have received a reply from you to my previous comment by email. I should remind you that the Discussions forum is designed for this, and the communication about details of the review process of the manuscript should happen through it. This way, Reviewing the code and data is part of the process, so I am replying here.

In your email, you say that the information requested is offered under request. This is unacceptable, our policy clearly states it, and indeed, your manuscript should have never been published in Discussions having such shortcomings. This was an oversight by the topical handling editor that, despite asking you for compliance with our policy, decided to approve your manuscripts for Discussions without all these issues adequately addressed.

In this way, we are giving you the opportunity to adhere to our code and data availability policy, but if you continue to fail to do it, we will reject your paper. There is no point in continuing with the review process for a work that can not be published because of a lack of compliance with the journal's requirements, independently of recommendations by any invited referee or comments by others.

You should be aware that "available upon request" does not guarantee that anyone interested in the code or data will have access to it. At best, you can provide an email address that eventually could become obsolete because of changes in an institution's internet domain, changes in a person's affiliation or the contact person could die. Also, there is no guarantee at all that if somebody reaches the person or contact to get the data, you will give it out. Should we simply trust you? I am sorry, but science is grounded on evidence, not trust what people say. 

Additionally, to publish part of your work, you use a repository that does not guarantee long-term archival (this usually implies more than 20 years of secured funding for it and the inability to remove the data by their creators). A few repositories comply, are widely used and are listed in our policy. So please, upload the assets of your manuscript to one of them. In your email, you state that the size of the dataset could be a problem for it and point out to 20 GB. This is not an issue at all; indeed, 20 GB is a small amount of data, and for example, Zenodo.org, one of the repositories that we accept, has a limit of 50 GB for each repository, and you can create and combine several repositories, each one with its own DOI to comply with our requirements. I could consider that size is an issue if we were discussing, at minimum, hundreds of GB or TB of data. In this way, you could upload at least a sample to let the readers test and evaluate part of the work presented in the manuscript.

I would like to note that authors should try their best to comply with a journal's policy before submitting a manuscript. Your initial submission included the use of a Git repository, which is clear in our policy does not comply with standards for scientific research. This reveals a lack of care about these details from your side when preparing the manuscript. Challenging authors to adhere to the journal's policy should not be the work of the editorial board or the staff in the office.

Despite your replies and communication, we do not understand yet why you do not publish the hydrological digital elevation models, and we request you comply with our policy. If you are not in a position to make them publicly available, you could consider withdrawing your manuscript. If you continue to fail to comply with our policy, our only option will be to reject your manuscript for consideration in Geoscientific Model Development.

I hope this is clearer now and that you understand the considerations made above.

Best regards,

Juan A. Añel

Geosci. Model Dev. Executive Editor