Act II · Recommendations and practices for open and reproducbile research

Scene 1 · Basics to get started

Learning outcomes…

• [RRP05] Organise a research project to facilitate reproducibility, openness and reuse.

• [RRP06] Contrast the main families of licences for software and data.

Content…

• We discuss practices and recommendations to get started with reproducibility

• We introduce and compare types of licences

Organisation & materials

[Estimated time: 4 hours]

There are excellent practical guides with general recommendations for promoting reproducibility, research data management and open science. This week we’ll take a look at three guides for open science and reproducible research.

1. The British Ecological Society publishes brief guidelines for conducting open science on ecology but applicable to any discipline. Among them, the guide Reproducible code (Cooper and Hsing 2019) explains organizational and managerial aspects for making software code more reproducible.

2. Passport for Open Science: A Practical Guide for PhD Students (Berti et al. 2022) explains how the principles of open science can be applied to doctoral research. The proposed practices are applicable to any discipline and, although focused on doctoral students, they are aimed at any researcher regardless of their previous experience.

3. A Beginner’s Guide to Conducting Reproducible Research (Alston and Rick 2021) is a very concise, practical guide to apply reproducible practices to a research project.

4. The Turing Way is indeed a compendium of guides on open science, reproducibility, and research ethics, among other interesting topics. Have a look at the Guide for Reproducible Research (The Turing Way Community 2019).

   As part of the Open Knowledge Portal, the UJI library includes guides for researchers about the open access dissemination of the results of the investigation, and copyright and licenses. Key steps towards open and transparent science have been:

   • October 2020 institutional statement to promote open access Declaración institucional a favor de la promoción del acceso abierto en la Universitat Jaume I;
   • End 2022 Código de Buenas Prácticas en Investigación y Doctorado (CBPID);
   • March 2023 adhesion to the COaRa Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA).

5. “Before: Basics to get started” (slides) summarises some of the organizational aspects and reproducible practices for the preparation and first steps of a project.

Assignments

• To continue with the Reproduction Plan, identify per each assessment criteria which practices and recommendations you can adopt (or have already adopted) to increase the level of reproducibility of your next paper.