100+ Summaries of Open and Reproducible Science Literature

Overview

The FORRT community has prepared 100+ summaries of Open and Reproducible Science literature. The purpose of these summaries is to reduce some of the burden on educators looking to incorporate open and reproducible research principles into their teaching as well as facilitate the edification of anyone wishing to learn or disseminate open and reproducible science tenets.

These summaries are very much a work in progress. We would love to receive your criticism, areas for improvement, ideas, and help.

You can find the summaries via the menu in the left. We made a distinction between “ Open and Reproducible Science” summaries and “ Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion” summaries to highlight that the topics of social injustices and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) are often neglected in academia, and in open and reproducible science literature. We have also prepared a .pdf version (coming soon!) in case you want to keep a copy for yourself. If you are an educator, you may also be interested in our FORRT Syllabus on Open and Reproducible Science (.pdf & G-doc), which is based on FORRT Clusters.

Why make these summaries?

The FORRT’s summaries is community-curated resource aims to satisfy three of FORRT’s Goals:

• Support scholars in their efforts to learn and stay up-to-date on best practices regarding open and reproducible research;
• Facilitating conversations about the ethics and social impact of teaching substantive topics with due regard to scientific openness, epistemic uncertainty and the credibility revolution;
• Foster social justice through the democratization of scientific educational resources and its pedagogies.

and four of FORRT’s Mission:

• Dismantling hierarchies surrounding research, teaching, and service;
• Building community among educators and various non-academic communities working to improve scientific communication and literacy across academia and the general public;
• Building capacity for advocacy; and
• Advocacy for the creation and maintenance of educational resources.

Future plans

Our community will continue to curate and expand on these summaries. Our goal is to keep integrating community feedback and its multitude of perspectives hoping to produce ever more useful summaries. We also would like community feedback on how to best classify the summaries into useful and didactic categories and distill its knowledge (at this stage, we also intend to making the methodology used transparent).

One idea to achieve these goals would be to plan a hackaton to make these summaries better to the community. Perhaps Open and Reproducible Science organizations (e.g., International Network of Open Science & Scholarship Communities (INOSC): OSCU, OSCNL, OSCA, OSCN, OSCR, OSC/e, OSCT, OSCG but also national organizations UKRN and NOSI) could help us in this process.

We also aim to further integrate this initiative with other FORRT initiatives. First, we want to make sure that all open and reproducible sources cited in the FORRT’s Manuscript have an associated summary to facilitate the reading of FORRT’s manifesto. The same goes for the FORRT’s self-assessment tool where educators evaluate their teaching and/or mentoring –i.e., the extent to which their teaching abides by open and reproducible research practices– and receive personalized feedback (on topics they requested). Finally, we also hope to include each summary as a resource in FORRT’s curated list of resources, as well include FORRT Clusters’ tags for each summary. Not yet at a ‘plans’ stage, but we are considering formalizing this initiative with the drafting of a manuscript, summarizing lessons we learned and hopefully making it a more useful resource to the community.

Process & Credit

Any and all contributions in FORRT are formally recognized. In large part, these summaries are a result of the heroic effort of Mahmoud Elsherif, a cherished member of FORRT community, who bore the brunt of most of the initial work. Flavio Azevedo conceptualized the project, reviewed summaries, and managed the initiative. This project would not have been possible without the tireless work of Leticia Micheli, Martin Vasilev, Jacob Miranda, Tamara Marques, Esther Plomp, Alice Rees, and Catia Oliveira who revised and improved the summaries to its current stage. Furthermore, members of CSCCE community have done a fair bit of reviewing of the DEI summaries. We would like to thank CSCCE for editing, commenting, and enriching it. These summaries are truly a community effort in the name of supporting scholars in their efforts to learn, stay up-to-date and teach open and reproducible science in Higher Education.

Feedback

Do you have feedback to give us? We would love to receive your criticism, areas for improvement, ideas, and help. You can also write to us at info@forrt.org or at Twitter, or join our community.

Join and help us

Help us make better education for everyone, join our community. Help us support educators and elevate their efforts. Help us facilitate the process of integrating open and reproducible science into the pipeline of all teachers and mentors in Higher-Ed. Help us advocate for open educational resources and expedite access to open and reproducible science trainings. Help us spread the word by sharing this FORRT resource via your professional listservs and other social media.