💁 R2S2 Knowledge Base


Reproducible Research Support Service (R2S2) Knowledge Base

The R2S2 was a temporary pilot conducted in collaboration by the project Opening Reproducible Research (https://o2r.info/) and the University and State Library of MĂźnster (ULB). Currently, there are no consultations possible. To learn more about the concept and offerings of the R2S2, take a look a the R2S2 page.

Reproducible research in general

This page is a growing list of potentially useful material if you want to become familiar with the topic of reproducible computational research. Start with the basic topics at the top and find more detailed, special, and advanced content further below. If you’re looking for guidelines or surveys for your discipline/area of research, see Reproducible research in …, and if you’re looking for help with a specific piece of softwareor programming languages, visit Reproducible research with …

🤔 What to know? The basics of reproducible research

The concept of a “research compendium”. Start with this Turing Way chapter - https://book.the-turing-way.org/reproducible-research/compendia.html, skim the original paper coining the term (https://doi.org/10.1198/106186007X178663), and then check out more information at https://research-compendium.science/, e.g., something from your discipline.

What to read, watch, or listen to?

I have only 20 minutes

I have only one hour

I have half a day

All of the above, then:

I have one full day

All of the above, then:

I have all the time I need

All of the above (though not necessarily in that order), then:

I have no time but a long commute

Journals to know

Other knowledge bases, lists, and courses

What to do at my group/lab/institute/department?

What about research software


Reproducible research in …

Discipline-specific material and resources, in additionto the general material on the section “Reproducible research: general material”. Are you interested in a different discipline and know about or look for useful links? Open an issue or a PR: https://github.com/o2r-project/o2r-project.github.io/ How about: Physics, Chemistry, Zoology, Space Science/Astronomy, Linguistics, …

Earth science & geosciences / GIScience / geography & spatial sciences / Ecology / Hydrology / Remote Sensing

Life science / Medicine / Neuroscience / Biology / Bioinformatics

Archaeology

Mathematics

Psychology

Economics

Political Science

Philosophy

Computer science & =E2=9A=99=EF=B8=8F Engineering

Social science & humanities

Communication


Reproducible research with …

Resources about reproducibility with specific tools, languages, or methods.

Computers & data

R

Python

Matlab

A concise guide to reproducible MATLAB projects, David Wilby: https://rse.shef.ac.uk/blog/2022-05-05-concise-guide-to-reproducible-matlab/

Machine Learning (ML) / Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Blind peer review

GitHub

Software and data citation and licensing

At some point the citation and licensing of software can become important for researchers. One structural problem of current science is, that very often scientific research software and research data is not covered by the commonly used ‘success metrics’ for scientific careers. Ensuring proper citation of software and data should thus be of high importance for developersand researchers alike. This holds for both your own software and data (making it citable, citing it) and software you use. Data sharing can benefit your scientific career by leading to greater collaboration, increased confidence in findings and goodwill between researchers (https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01506-x). Furthermore, several studies have shown that articles making data available have a citation benefit and data are actually reused (https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.175, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230416).The same can be argued for software.

Licensing is important to keep in mind when starting toshare, collaboratively develop, or reuse code and data. It’s worth gettinga quick overview of what copyright is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright) and to acknowledge that (i) copyright law is very diverse across legal jurisdictions, (ii) the laws and their application for “modern” things like data and software are partly still evolving, and (iii) we need copyright law to be able to allow people to use our work. Important disclaimer: the information provided here is not legal advice. If youare unsure about copyright and licensing, consult your lawyer.

“The Legal Framework for Reproducible Scientific Research - Licensing and Copyright” (https://doi.org/10.1109/MCSE.2009.19, public PDF at https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8GH9TD8/download) gives you a good overview and provides clear recommendations on practices and licenses, as is “A Quick Guide to Software Licensing for the Scientist-Programmer” (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002598). If you want to make sure the licenses of software you use or share supports your intentions and do not stand in conflict with each other, TL;DR Legal can help you out: https://tldrlegal.com/. The website http://forschungslizenzen.de informs about rights and licenses for research data (German only) with a special focus on the humanities.

The Software Sustainability Institute’s page “How to cite and describe software” is a great starting point for software citation (https://www.software.ac.uk/how-cite-software), albeit being a bit outdated. A more current article ais “Recognizing the value of software: a software citation guide” (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.26932.2), as it includes recent initiatives such as Software Heritage (https://www.softwareheritage.org/). If you use a modern reference managers, the biblatex-software style (https://www.softwareheritage.org/2020/05/26/citing-software-with-style/) might be useful. The GitHub-Zenodo integration makes getting a citable DOI for every release very easy (https://guides.github.com/activities/citable-code/), but manual publishing from GitLab(.com, ZIV-GitLab) is almost as simple. Pro-tip: look for .zenodo.json files on GitHub to automate the metadata insertion on Zenodo and consider publishing a software paper in JOSS (https://joss.theoj.org/) or JORS (https://openresearchsoftware.metajnl.com/).

For data citation, university libraries and data repositories are your places to go. Data publication is part of more established practices around research data management (RDM, Forschungsdatenmanagement -FDM) and often is required by funders. Therefore, all universities have services in this area (https://www.uni-muenster.de/Forschungsdaten/) and the more static and less evolving nature of data, compared to software, makes some things easier as well. Generic information can be found at DataCite (“Cite your Data”, https://datacite.org/cite-your-data.html) and DataVerse (https://dataverse.org/best-practices/data-citation). Open Data Commons (https://opendatacommons.org/) provides established licenses to use and an excellent FAQ (https://opendatacommons.org/faq/licenses/).

In a nutshell

Research Software Engineering & Software publishing

High Performance Computing (HPC)

Containers

Cite this page as "💁 R2S2 Knowledge Base" (2019) in Opening Reproducible Research: a research project website and blog. Daniel Nüst, Marc Schutzeichel, Markus Konkol (eds). Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.1485437

Creative Commons Licence
Except where otherwise noted site content created by the o2r project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.