FAIR and reproducible code working group

Lead: Nico­las Dintzn­er

Mem­bers: Heather Andrews, Mar­i­an­na Avetisyan, Con­nie Clare, Kees den Hei­jer, Simone Fricke, San­tosh Ilam­paruthi, Paula Mar­tinez Lavanchy, Zafer Özturk, Diana Popa, Phuong Truong, Yasemin Türky­il­maz van der Velden, Qian Zhang and Eiri­ni Zorm­pa.

Objec­tives: This work­ing group brings data stew­ards from the 4TU.ResearchData part­ner insti­tu­tions togeth­er to learn about use­ful tools; writ­ing, doc­u­ment­ing and test­ing code; ver­sion con­trol and col­lab­o­ra­tion; pipelines for pro­gram­ming lan­guages; and archiv­ing and licens­ing of soft­ware code. Our ulti­mate aim is to co-cre­ate and dis­sem­i­nate tem­plates to help researchers achieve the min­i­mum require­ments for writ­ing soft­ware code that fol­lows the FAIR prin­ci­ples. Such tem­plates will rec­om­mend prac­tices to fur­ther increase the read­abil­i­ty and reuse of code. 

Expec­ta­tions: Mem­bers attend a one-hour month­ly meet­ing on the sec­ond Tues­day of each month. Mem­bers con­duct exer­cis­es and under­take prepara­to­ry work in between meet­ings as required.

Deliv­er­ables: 

1. A ‘Train the train­er’ work­shop about ‘Writ­ing FAIR and repro­ducible code’

On the 24th and 25th June, the work­ing group con­duct­ed an online ‘Train the Train­er’ work­shop for the data stew­ards from 4TU.ResearchData part­ner insti­tu­tions to learn best prac­tices for writ­ing FAIR and repro­ducible soft­ware code. 

The ses­sions pro­vid­ed an oppor­tu­ni­ty for data stew­ards to learn best prac­tices for writ­ing FAIR and repro­ducible soft­ware code from one anoth­er. The work­shop was con­duct­ed in a ‘flipped class­room’ for­mat which required learn­ers to under­take var­i­ous code man­age­ment exer­cis­es before the ses­sions and, then, work on live prob­lem-solv­ing dur­ing the ses­sions.

Read more about our expe­ri­ence of organ­is­ing the ‘Train the train­er’ work­shop.

2. Edu­ca­tion­al tem­plates for writ­ing FAIR and repro­ducible code

From Sep­tem­ber, the work­ing group will devel­op tem­plates and guide­lines to help researchers write FAIR and repro­ducible soft­ware code.

More to fol­low about this deliv­er­able at the end of 2021!

Web­page con­tent con­trib­u­tors: Heather Andrews, Con­nie Clare and Eiri­ni Zorm­pa.

4TU.ResearchData working groups

Pri­va­cy and GDPR work­ing group

Engage­ment and edu­ca­tion work­ing group