How open workflows increase impact and enhance open science?

A special episode of our ”Wow, What an Impact!” podcast (Vau, mikä vaikutus!) was aired on Monday. In the episode we talked about open science and particularly how researchers can open up their work flow with our guest, associate professor Caspar van Lissa from Tilburg University. Listen the episode here.

Over the past 20 years, the relationship between science and society has changed and developed into a much more open and interactive direction. This development has also influenced the emergence of the principles and practices of Open Science that define how researchers should open up their methods, results and applications of scientific discoveries to the society as a whole. Open Science aims to support researchers in more responsible research and impactful knowledge creation by fostering sharing and collaboration as early as possible and whenever it is possible. The ambitions of the Open Science encompass the whole research cycle from the processes of the creation of scientific knowledge to its dissemination and evaluation. Today the landscape of Open Science practices have changed and the spectrum of practices has expanded, one example of emergent open science practices is open and reproducible workflows.

The technical definition for open and reproducible workflows is that the process by which you go from data to insights can be reproduced by clicking a button. Traditionally when you read a scientific paper, you only get to read the results, not the data and analyses the researchers have used. The reader has to trust the authors that the process is correct.  Alternative way to present research results is an open reproducible work-flow where the code and the data are available somewhere and the reader can access them just by clicking a button and then run through the code and get the same results that are published in the paper. Now the reader no longer has to trust the authors, but can check that the authors’ pipeline for analyses is correct and leads to the published results.

The benefits for applying the open and reproducible workflow practices are that you can trust your own work more. If you work reproducibly, that means that you can check every aspect of your work and it also means that other people can check every aspect of your work if you give them access. This leads to work that is more reliable because you eliminate errors and the other thing is that you can save a lot of time because everything that’s shared doesn’t have to be recreated by someone else.

The best way to get started is to join or form an open-science community and to build your own network. Through these networks you can make it visible for others what expertise you already have and share that expertise with them. You should also collaborate with people who know things that you want to learn, collaborate with people who need your expertise, affirm these new connections, extend your network and make use of the existing open-science network.

Listen more great concrete examples about opening up your workflow from the special episode of “Wow, What and Impact!” -podcast.

Check out our guest speaker in Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@cjvanlissa

More information about Caspar van Lissa: https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/staff/c-j-vanlissa

Laura ja Outi

The authors work as development specialists at Research Development Unit of the University of Turku.

Julkaisun tiedot: 7/2022, Open Up!-blogi, ISSN 2814-8967