How can we perpetuate reproducibility?

Question

Two years ago, Roger Peng discussed in his blog the ramifications of requiring reproducibility for the first producers of research objects, but not for reusers. He then proposes

What I think a good reproducibility policy should have is a type of "viral" clause. For example, the GNU General Public License (GPL) is an open source software license that requires, among other things, that anyone who writes their own software, but links to or integrates software covered under the GPL, must publish their software under the GPL too. This "viral" requirement ensures that people cannot make use of the efforts of the open source community without also giving back to that community.

I agree that having such a perpetuating policy element is very desirable, but would try to establish community norms around that, rather than using copyright or related legal constructs. My thoughts here are influenced by the common practice of framing plagiarism primarily or even exclusively as a copyright issue. But even if all the plagiarized sources were in the public domain, it would still be plagiarism, which in scientific contexts means ignoring the community norm that all statements sourced from elsewhere should indicate those sources, as well as direct quotes.

So my first hunch at perpetuating reproducibility would be to get community organs like funders, publishers, institutions or learned societies to express support for the idea that reproducibility should trigger reproducibility. How best to phrase the core elements of such statements?

This post has been migrated from the Open Science private beta at StackExchange (A51.SE)

Answer 1

I would phrase it as follows (inspired by the GPL, mostly paragraph 5c):

This is an open science research project and has committed to freely share [insert types of information/data here]. You are encouraged to use this in derivative research. However, by doing so, you commit your project to share the same information as that identified above and must require the same constraints on reuse as identified here. This stipulation does not invalidate separately-obtained permissions if you have received them from the original researchers.

This post has been migrated from the Open Science private beta at StackExchange (A51.SE)

Comments

That seems like a good start!

This post has been migrated from the Open Science private beta at StackExchange (A51.SE)

---

Thanks! And thanks for catching the format error, serves me right for not checking it after posting.

This post has been migrated from the Open Science private beta at StackExchange (A51.SE)

---

Reposted at http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/51880/how-can-we-perpetuate-reproducibility

This post has been migrated from the Open Science private beta at StackExchange (A51.SE)

---

Unfortunately I'm not a member of that community. Perhaps we could just move this question over there since this site is closing. I've often seen that done with closing beta sites. If you agree, I recommend flagging it for moderator attention and suggest the move.

This post has been migrated from the Open Science private beta at StackExchange (A51.SE)

---

What about giving it a try there? I think migrating questions won't work if they have already been posted by hand, but since I don't know how to do the former, I opted for the latter.

This post has been migrated from the Open Science private beta at StackExchange (A51.SE)

---

I'm already in too many communities. ;) Just flagged it for moving.

This post has been migrated from the Open Science private beta at StackExchange (A51.SE)