[Tom Honeyman]

We hope you are enjoying P22 and have had a chance to attend a few of the sessions so far! We are diving into our asynchronous discussion, which you can join here in the mailing list or through our slack in the #rda-plenary-22 channel. Our next featured group is the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN).

UKRN

The UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) is a grassroot movement aiming to foster open and robust research practices in the UK university sector by investigating the factors that contribute to robust research, promoting training activities, and disseminating best practice. We currently have two interest groups related to computational reproducibility – one focused on the “spotchecking” of research outputs and one focused on making computational reproducibility intelligible to a broad audience of researchers, beyond technical disciplines.

Briefly, tell us about your work/organization and how it’s related to computational reproducibility; What are you trying to address and how?

The UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) is a grassroot movement gathering representatives from about 70 Universities in the UK. Our aim is to foster open and robust research practices. We do this by investigating the factors that contribute to robust research, promoting training activities, and disseminating best practice. We also work collaboratively with various external stakeholders to ensure coordination of efforts across the sector. We seek to understand the factors that contribute to poor research reproducibility and replicability, and develop approaches to counter these, to improve the trustworthiness and quality of research. These issues affect all disciplines, so we aim for broad disciplinary representation. We believe that ongoing efforts to address these issues represent an opportunity to improve our research by reforming culture and practice.

What is your/your organization’s vision when it comes to computational reproducibility (e.g., all scholarship is computationally reproducible by default)?

Computational reproducibility means different things to different people, and it isn’t the only aspect of reproducibility that is important to UKRN membership. However, we currently have two interest groups related to computational reproducibility, one focused on the “spotchecking” of research output at the level of an institution, which includes the reproducibility of scripted analyses, and a more recent one focused on making computational reproducibility intelligible to a broad audience of researchers, beyond technical disciplines.

What are some of the challenges you see to achieving this vision?

“Doing” computational reproducibility should not need a degree in computer science, and training people from varied disciplines can be challenging. Identifying the right level that people should care about can be tricky.

What would you like to ask the members of our Interest Group?

Any tips?

Check out a recent publication about the Croatian Reproducibility Network: Ursić, L., Bralić, N., Žuljević, M. F., Puljak, L., & Buljan, I. (2024). Exploring the understanding of reproducibility among stakeholders within academia and their expectations for a web-based education tool: A qualitative study. Accountability in Research, 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2024.2345723

Discussion