Last week, researchers from the Universities of Bath, Cambridge, Salford, Stirling and the West of Scotland attended a workshop delivered by Richard Ball on teaching transparent and reproducible research methods.
Project TIER – Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research – is all about using computational reproducibility within research projects at both undergrad and postgrad level. Computational reproducibility is a prerequisite for many other aspects of research integrity and transparency. And as Richard says, computational reproducibility ‘is just so concretely doable’. Project TIER is software neutral, Richard used Stata to show worked examples but it can be used within many other software programs.
Following a discussion on why researchers should create a reproduction package and the materials (data, scripts, output files) that must be included, Richard demonstrated how key elements of reproducibility can be incorporated into a simple research project and how these steps provide a high standard of reproducibility. These included a well-defined folder structure, the importance of a working directory, and the use of relative directory paths to indicate folder locations. Slides from the workshop, as well as documentation for the examples Richard presented, can be found here. More information on Project TIER protocol can be found here.
Building upon this workshop we’re delighted to announce that UKRN are combining forces with Project TIER and the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORRT) to deliver a symposium later this year. This will include webinars, online resources and discussion sessions in which researchers from across the USA and UK will provide further evidence and experience of working with Project TIER. Watch this space!