TIER2 partners from the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité organised a Reproducibility Hackathon (ReproHack) as a satellite event to the FENS Forum 2024. The FENS Forum is Europe’s largest neuroscience conference covering all aspects of research in this field.
The aim of the TIER2 ReproHack was to connect neuroscientists and create an environment that allowed participants to gain insights into reproducibility, exchange knowledge, and share experiences. The ReproHack was joined by 7 researchers at different career stages and from various universities, and they worked together, attempting to reproduce published research findings.
At the start of the ReproHack, two guest speakers provided further insights in the form of lightning talks. Dr Anna Krystalli, research software engineering consultant and founder of the ReproHack project, gave a brief introduction to ReproHacks and shared some best practices for participating in a ReproHack. Next, Emma Wilson, a PhD student at the Center for Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh, talked about reproducibility in neuroscience and shared reproducibility lessons learned from her work.
During the first round of co-working, participants could either select a publication from a list provided by the organisers or propose an interesting publication themselves. The following two publications were selected by participants for the ReproHack:
1. Beren Millidge - Combining Active Inference and Hierarchical Predictive Coding: A Tutorial Introduction and Case Study. 2019. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io%2Fkf6wc.
2. Renton, A.I., Dao, T.T., Johnstone, T. et al - Neurodesk: an accessible, flexible and portable data analysis environment for reproducible neuroimaging. 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-023-02145-x.
Participants worked the rest of the ReproHack on trying to reproduce the findings by using the data and code provided by the original authors. This was done in three rounds of co-working, and after each round participants came together for a short re-grouping and sharing of experiences. At the end, review reports were submitted to the original authors with constructive feedback on the reproducibility, documentation, and reusability of their published work.
Snippet from the TIER2 ReproHack
The organisation of this event was supported by Prof. Claus Lamm and Dr. Donald Sladky (University of Vienna, Faculty of Psychology, SCAN Unit).
Please note: This event format is not intended to criticise or discredit any research efforts. Instead, reproduction attempts are a beneficial scientific activity with useful outcomes for the original authors and valuable learning experience for both the participants and the wider research community.
