Open Science Practices

Last updated on 2023-02-13 | Edit this page

Apply Open Science Best Practices

Overview

Questions

  • How to maintain history of contributions and contributors?
  • How to apply open science practices to work transparently and collaborate openly?

Objectives

  • Describe the importance of version control systems
  • Nudge the use of GitHub/GitLab for open collaboration
  • Share open science practices for transparent and ethical research

Open Science invites all researchers to share their work, data and research components openly so that others can read, reuse, reproduce, build upon and share them. Particularly in computational research and software development projects, open source practices are widely promoted. Unfortunately, making research components open doesn’t always mean that they can be easily discovered by everyone, can be reproduced and built upon by others or everyone will know how to use them. Applying open and inclusive principles to open science and reproducible research requires time, intention, resources and collaboration, which can be overwhelming for many (see Ten arguments against Open Science that you can win). However, by normalising the use of research best practices on a day-to-day basis, you can ensure that everyone has a chance to build habits around opening their work for others in the team, asking for regular feedback, getting attributed for their work and enjoying the process of collaboration.

Open doesn’t mean sharing everything, but making it ‘as open as possible and as closed as necessary’. Your research can still be reproducible without all parts necessarily being open. Research projects that use sensitive data should be more careful and follow research data management plans closely (discussed in the next chapter).

Important Reasons for Practicing Openness

Open Science in Research

  • Maintains transparency
  • Allows others to attribute your work fairly
  • Stops others from reinventing the wheel
  • Invites collaborators from all around the world
  • Makes your work easy to release to be cited by others
Image shows a person having internal debate about open vesus closed research. Open means new opportunities and inclusivity but closed maybe required to ensure data sensitivity or wrongly assumed for funding for novel work.

Open versus Closed Research. The Turing Way project illustration by Scriberia for The Turing Way Community Shared under CC-BY 4.0 License. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3332807

  • When a project is designed in an open repository, it allows all stakeholders to track the progress, raise errors and collaborate to improve the project.
  • When developed openly, such as on GitLab or through the registered report, it is easy to point to the timeline when an idea or experiment was proposed and exhibit how the project developed, who contributed and how others can attribute the work.
  • Having your research open from the start can help others working in similar subjects or starting research. It allows them to conduct their review work effectively and build on the existing work, rather than starting from scratch, or ‘reinventing the wheel’.
  • With open repositories and descriptions for where you need help or how others can collaborate, you can get people in your area with complementing skills and new ideas interested in your work, even when you don’t know them.

Choose a License

Research does not have to be completed to be useful to others. Having a license is the way to communicate how do you want your research to be used and shared. There are different types of licenses depending on the type of research objects such as code, data or documentation and preferences for re-use and sharing. The choosealicense website has a good mechanism to help you pick a license. To learn more about how to add a license to your project, read the Licensing chapter in The Turing way Guide for Reproducible Research.

Every Little Step Counts towards Openness

Open Science can mean different things in different contexts: open data, open source code, open access publication, open scholarship, open hardware, open education, open notebook, citizen science and inclusive research. Expert open science practitioners might consider applying a combination of open science practices and make decisions in their work to maintain different kinds of openness. However, for the new starters in your team, open science can be as simple as ensuring that:

  • everyone has added an appropriate license to their project repository,
  • recorded their work and shared their project’s roadmap on a README/landing page,
  • provided some basic manual for how to use their work and how to contribute,
  • given credit to previous work upon which they build, and
  • regularly communicate about their research.
Image shows a woman slowly gaining trust and confidence in opening up her research project and benefitting from open collaboration

Small steps towards open science. The Turing Way project illustration by Scriberia for The Turing Way Community Shared under CC-BY 4.0 License. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3332807

Encourage taking small steps towards openness as a responsibility towards research integrity in your team. There are many community-driven resources, guidance and opportunities in open science that provided structured support to learn about open science. For instance, The Turing Way chapter on Open Research and FOSTER Open Science provides an introduction to help researchers understand what open science is and why it is something you should care about. Another hands-on opportunity is provided by Open Life Science, which is a 16-week long training and mentoring for anyone in research interested in going through the programme to apply open science practices systematically in their research projects.

Conclusion

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Resources and References for Technical Details

Key Points

  • Version controlled repository help record different contributions and contributor information openly.
  • Open Science is an umbrella term that involve different practices for research in the context of different research objects.
  • Online Persistent Identifiers or Digital Object Identifiers are useful for releasing and citing different versions of research objects.