Integrating and Evaluating Best Practices in Research Reproducibility at Carnegie Mellon University

Researchers face many challenges when producing accessible, reproducible, and reusable research. These challenges may arise from a lack of knowledge on which resources are available or simply having no gauge on the outcomes of peers reusing their work. Many tools exist to help researchers organize lab notes, protocols, and code for open dissemination, but they are often underutilized, as researchers are unaware of available institutional licenses or methods for integrating these tools across each stage of the research lifecycle. In this talk, we will describe how library associates at Carnegie Mellon University will conduct a campus-wide study to understand how open science tools can influence reproducible research. This project aims to create a community of diverse researchers that will collectively explore open science tools and apply them in a collaborative effort to reproduce and extend the findings of a research analysis. We will provide participants with a collection of digital outputs from a computational research project which includes access to data from our institutional repository, procedures recorded in protocols.io, and scripts prepared in Code Ocean. Each participant will reproduce an analysis from a sample project and conduct an additional analysis as an extension of the original study. Participants will upload their results to a project site on Open Science Framework, which will serve as the central venue for participants to share findings and collaborate on a collective analysis that extends the original study. Based on feedback and successes from participants, our results will address the best practices for integrating tools from libraries in the research lifecycle to support the needs of researchers who aim to maximize reproducibility across all disciplines.