Pilots

TIER2's Decision Aid will provide clarity on the meaning, relevance, and feasibility of ‘reproducibility’ for researchers to aid them in identifying what type of reproducibility is relevant for their research and indicate what they must consider regarding how feasible such ‘reproducibility’ would be for them. The tool will be piloted with two researcher groups (qualitative and machine learning researchers).

The Reproducibility Management Plan (RMP) Pilot aims to create a prototype of key thematic subjects and questions that will serve as the starting point to support reproducibility at the planning stage of research. Work involves defining what an RMP is, integrating it into the ARGOS service, and testing its effectiveness with feedback from the community. The pilot addresses researchers, beneficiaries and funders for its adoption.

The Reproducible workflows Pilot focuses on enhancing reproducibility in life sciences and computer sciences, by adapting the SCHEMA open-source platform, using technologies like software containerisation, workflow description languages, and experiment packaging specifications to fit specific epistemic needs.

In this Pilot, we aim to provide a structure of well-defined checklists and templates that can help review data and code reproducibility for computational social scientists. The checklists and review templates cater for the specific needs of the three research phases, i.e., planning and data collection, process and analysis and finally sharing and archiving the research resources. It results in building trust and authority in the social science research community.

The Pilot will develop a policy template with recommendations for funders to foster reproducible practices both in the research they fund (evaluation and monitoring) and their internal practices.

The Reproducibility Monitoring Dashboard Pilot aims to develop tools that enable funding agencies to track and monitor the reusability of research artifacts across various projects, programs, topics, and disciplines. This auto-generated dashboard assesses the impacts of policies related to data and code sharing. Furthermore, we are establishing essential requirements to make the dashboard user-friendly for publishers.

This Pilot is aimed at increasing data sharing in published work. Data sharing is an important building block for increased reproducibility & transparency, but current rates of sharing are low.

This Pilot will co-create and test an Editorial Reference Handbook that contributes towards a common understanding and what is required to assist reproducibility and FAIRness. The Handbook, identified as a priority in a workshop with publishers,  will include two components. A structured section will include educational and practical set of checks, defined by reviewing existing material, harmonising and operationalising them. Some journals have internal checks, but the type, richness and stringency vary, and there is little/no consensus among publishers. A narrative component with a general  framework will help improve internal processes, defined by describing an ideal process where checks should be applied. There are a variety of internal processes, and how, when and by whom these checks are done vary, and this can also affect the results. 

The Pilot includes representatives of Cambridge University Press, Cell Press, EMBO Press, F1000 (Taylor & Francis), GigaScience Press, Lancet, Oxford University Press, PLOS, Springer Nature, Wiley.