Final event highlights innovative tools, pilot results, and policy recommendations to advance reproducible research across disciplines.

Since January 2023, the TIER2 project has been exploring new tools, practices and policies to strengthen research reproducibility across diverse disciplinary contexts. The project’s closing symposium, The Future of Reproducibility Research and Policy, took place on 11 February 2026, bringing together 139 participants to reflect on progress and future priorities.

The event focused on how emerging technologies, evolving policy frameworks, and varied research practices can support more transparent and reliable science. Discussions addressed challenges in implementing reproducibility across epistemic contexts, the growing role of AI and data-intensive methods, and the need to balance openness with responsible research practices. Incentives, infrastructure and collaboration were highlighted as key drivers for building a global culture of reproducible research.

Opening the symposium, TIER2 coordinator Tony Ross-Hellauer (Know Center Research) welcomed participants and outlined the project’s work, emphasising that while reproducibility is widely regarded as a cornerstone of scientific enquiry, definitions and expectations vary considerably across fields.

The keynote by Sabina Leonelli (Technical University of Munich), titled “Humane openness and epistemic diversity: Rethinking reproducibility in the AI age”, explored openness as a socially situated practice shaped by research contexts. Drawing on her forthcoming work and her recent paper Environmental Intelligence: Redefining the Philosophical Premises of AI, Leonelli highlighted the need for inclusive, context-sensitive approaches to openness that recognise diverse research cultures and motivations.

Understanding reproducibility in context

The session “Understanding reproducibility in context” featured Jesper Schneider (Aarhus University), who emphasised that reproducibility is not a one-size-fits-all concept and must be understood in relation to different research designs and epistemic traditions. Schneider presented conceptual work conducted within TIER2, including the knowledge production modes (KPM) framework, developed to evaluate the relevance and feasibility of reproducibility as a research practice and a criterion of research quality in diverse settings. 

Next, TIER2’s project manager Nicki Lisa Cole (Know Center Research) took the stage to present findings from project’s three scoping reviews:

• Open science interventions to improve reproducibility and replicability of research, aimed at identifying evidence on the effectiveness of interventions across disciplines.

• Reproducibility in machine-learning-based research: Overview, barriers, and drivers, which mapped the main barriers and drivers of reproducibility in machine learning, including code, data, experimental design, and description.

• Reproducibility and replicability of qualitative research: an integrative review of concepts, barriers and enablers, which synthesised debates on reproducibility, replication, and Open Science in qualitative research.

The reviews identified effective measures, including data-sharing mandates and software tools that enable code re-execution. Field-specific, community-driven guidelines were also found to enhance transparency and reuse.

In her talk, Nicki Lisa Cole also introduced Qualitopia, a meta-scientific initiative aiming to build networks and policy engagement to ensure qualitative research is meaningfully represented in transparency and research integrity frameworks across Europe.

Improving the research system from within

The panel “Improving the research system from within: What’s next for meta-research?” brought together Tracey Weissgerber (University of Coimbra, iRISE project), Tim Errington (Center for Open Science, TIER2 Advisory Board), Emily Sena (University of Edinburgh, iRISE project), and Inge Stegeman (University of Utrecht, OSIRIS project coordinator). The discussion highlighted collaboration between TIER2 and its sister projects, OSIRIS and iRISE, as well as the shared challenges of advancing research improvement initiatives. As part of this ongoing collaboration, the panel showcased the Meta-Research for Research Improvement (MERRI) Collaboration, which supports research culture reform through community building, training and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Highlights from TIER2’s pilot activities

TIER2 aimed to explore the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to low levels of research reproducibility across disciplines, focusing on the social, life, and computer sciences as well as publishers and funders. At its core were eight pilot activities that developed, implemented and evaluated new tools and practices. These efforts were showcased during a dedicated symposium session, where the leading partners presented outputs designed to strengthen research practice:

• Reproducibility Management Plan (RMP) – Elli Papadopolulou (Athena Research Center) presented a framework that extends traditional Data Management Plans into comprehensive reproducibility planning tools covering the full research lifecycle. Co-created with 89 participants across 15 countries and implemented in the production-ready ARGOS platform, the approach has already been adopted by the CHIST-ERA funding programme for ICT projects.

• Reproducible Workflows – Eleni Adamidi introduced SCHEMA lab, an open-source virtual environment that enables researchers to design, execute and track containerised experiments with full provenance. By capturing datasets, software environments and performance metrics, the platform supports transparency, reuse and FAIR research practices.

• Reproducibility Checklists for Computational Social Science Research – Fakhr Momeni (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) presented a checklists embedded in the Methods Hub workflow that define essential documentation requirements for data, code and computational environments, making studies easier to understand, evaluate and reuse.

• Reproducibility Promotion Plans for Funders – Barbara Leither (AmsterdamUMC) and Friederike E. Kohrs (Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin) presented a policy framework with actionable recommendations to help funding organisations strengthen reproducible practices across evaluation, incentives and monitoring.

• Reproducibility Monitoring Dashboard – Haris Papageorgiou (ARC) introduced tools, including the Reproducibility Composite Confidence Index (RCCI), designed to help funders track the reusability of research outputs and assess the impact of data- and code-sharing policies across projects and disciplines.

• Data Availability Statments – Thomas Klebel (Know Center Research) addressed challenges in promoting data sharing despite journal requirements. He presented an editorial intervention approach aimed at increasing repository deposition rates, noting that stronger policies and enforcement may ultimately be necessary to achieve widespread change.

• An Editorial Reference Handbook for Reproducibility and FAIRness – Allyson Lister presented the Handbook, which informs and assists scholarly publishers in supporting the sharing of digital research objects and in operationalising findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) research practices by addressing gaps in editorial workflows, policy implementation and stakeholder alignment.

Policy panel and concluding discussion

The symposium concluded with a policy panel moderated by Joeri Tijdink (Amsterdam University Medical Center), who presented the Recommendations for Reproducible Research from TIER2 policy brief. Speakers Pantelis Tziveloglou (European Commission), James Morris (Science Europe), Panagiotis Kavouras (University of Oslo, coordinator of the TRUSTparency project), and Catriona J. MacCallum (Wiley) reflected on the recommendations’ relevance and benefits for different stakeholders and shared thoughts on how public research funding and performing organisations can promote sustainable research culture shifts towards systems that truly value reproducibility as a core component of what we mean by research quality, and how policy and practice change can promote the necessary evolution of research cultures. The session was interactive, with attendees participating in a poll on topics such as whether strict reproducibility requirements can sometimes reduce research quality, whether mandates are more effective than incentives, and whether replication should be embedded in mainstream funding. Their responses framed a lively discussion with the experts on the future of reproducibility practices.

We thank all attendees for joining us to learn more about the outcomes from our project, the experts for their support and contributions, and our partners for their dedication and efforts throughout this journey. 

Watch the full recording of our final event here.