Opening Reproducible Research (ORR)

Basic data for this project

Description

Open access is not only a form of publishing such that research papers become available to the large public free of charge, it also refers to a trend in science that the act of doing research becomes more open and transparent. When science transforms to open access we mean access to papers, research data being collected, data being generated, access to the procedures carried out in the research paper, even to the computational environment that was used, in order to reproduce and inspect the findings in the paper.Reproducibility of research findings, the ability to repeat experimental procedures and confirm previously found results, is at the heart of the scientific method. For many sciences the reproduction involves the replication of an experimental set up, e.g. in the lab or a field mission to collect data. Increasingly, scientific results are generated by numerical manipulation of data that were already collected, and may involve simulation experiments that are completely carried out computationally.In this proposal Opening Reproducible Research (ORR) we directly aim for the main aspects of open access, by improving the exchange of, by facilitating productive access to and by simplifying reuse of research results that are published over the Internet. The experimentally oriented proposal ORR aims at both the publication process (technische und organisatorische Aspekte des Publikationsprozesses) and the reuse of publications (Absichern der möglichst umfassenden Nachnutzbarkeit der Publikationen), but combines these goals by setting a clear innovation in the area of reproducible research, a goal that has extraordinary meaning for scientific publication. Central to the proposal is a new form for creating and providing research results, the executable research compendium (ERC), which not only enables third parties to reproduce the original research and hence recreate the original research results (figures, tables), but also facilitates interaction with them and the recombination of them with new data or methods. The container format that specifies the ERC will store all information required by different applications (e.g. one-click reproduce, long-term archive, research information systems, discovery purposes) and thus guarantees use independent from original information systems. Building on existing open standards and software, this project will develop standards and tools for ERCs and demonstrate and evaluate these based on fully fledged case studies, initially taken from the geosciences domain. ORR will make a step forward towards executable papers as a new standard in scientific publication.