German Reproducibility Network - a new platform for Open Science in Germany

What is it about?

Open Science has established itself as a movement across all scientific disciplines in recent years. It supports good practices in science and research that lead to more robust, comprehensible, and reusable results. The aim is to improve the transparency and quality of scientific results so that more trust is achieved, both in the sciences themselves and in society. Transparency requires that uncertainties and assumptions are made explicit and disclosed openly. Currently, the Open Science movement is largely driven by grassroots initiatives and small scale projects. We discuss some examples that have taken on different facets of the topic: - The software developed and used in the research process is playing an increasingly important role. The Research Software Engineers (RSE) communities have therefore organized themselves in national and international initiatives to increase the quality of research software. - Evaluating reproducibility of scientific articles as part of peer review requires proper creditation and incentives for both authors and specialised reviewers to spend extra efforts to facilitate workflow execution. The Reproducible AGILE initiative has established a reproducibility review at a major community conference in GIScience. - Technological advances for more reproducible scholarly communication beyond PDFs, such as containerisation, exist, but are often inaccessible to domain experts who are not programmers. Targeting geoscience and geography, the project Opening Reproducible Research (o2r) develops infrastructure to support publication of research compendia, which capture data, software (incl. execution environment), text, and interactive figures and maps.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

reproducibility is a grounding aspect in science. The German Reproducibiltiy Network aims to provide a platform for different local initiatives on Open Science and reproducibility to connect and exchange knowledge about best practices.