OSF GPS Lecture

Lesson adapted from:

Jolene Esposito OSF-Curriculum csoderberg OSF-Curriculum

Lesson 1: Introduction

Learning objectives:

• Understand the current issues and barrier to reproducibility
• Understand why the whole workflow is important
• Understand documentation/organizational issues underpinning this

What is the problem?

Researchers often have three broad goals for their work:

• 1) they are interested in studying innovative ideas; they want to discover new things about how the world works

• 2) they are interested in producing reproducible results; they want to be able to find there results again, and they want others to be able to find them as well

• 3) they want to build off their own and others work and in order to accumulate knowledge over time; they want research to move our understanding of the work forward

• Over the past few years there has been a growing concern that many of the findings in the published literature may not replicate.

• There is evidence from a broad range of fields, including cancer biology, psychology, and political science, that the published literature may not be as reliable.

• This demo will introduce standard research practices that lead scientists to produce research that is more difficult to reproduce and replicate, thus leading to generally low levels of replicability.

What is the Reproducibility?

• Computational reproducibility - taking someones data and their code/analysis scripts and reran exactly what they did, you would be able to reproduce the numbers that are reported in their paper.

• Empirical reproducibility - reproducing what was done in a study. Having enough information to rerun the experiment or survey the way it was originally conducted.

• Replicability - Having enough information to reproduce the studies protocol completely, and reproduce the analyses completely, and run them on independent data set, would we reproduce the results? Would we come to the same statistical conclusions as the original study?

Often in research we want the results of studies to be reproducible, so we want our scientific findings to replicate.

What we are going to do in class:

• Work with the OSF to increase the documentation and transparency of your workflow, and learning how to use the environment that will help you apply best data management practices.

• To do this, we’re all going to be working in the OSF applying the TIER protocol.

• You’ll work on building an open, transparent research project in order to learn good data/project management practices and practical use of the OSF.

Getting Started

Activity

• Setup a new account or sign in to OSF here
• walk through the OSF for Institutions login.