What can research teams do to encourage open science?

Question

The research landscape is complex, and different actors have different options to help with a systemic move towards open science.

Research teams

• perform, document and communicate research
• review and validate research performed by others
• collaborate with other research teams and individual researchers
• help administrate financial, legal, ethical and other aspects of research
• do many other things

In this thread, I would like us to explore which options research teams have to explore open science themselves and to encourage it in the communities and other stakeholders they interact with.

If you have multiple ideas for concrete actions, I suggest to post them as separate answers (rather than as one monolithic answer), so as to facilitate the discussion and refinement of your ideas.

Answer 1

Require sharing from day 1, though not necessarily in public.

The point here is that the effort that goes into sharing workflows with one other person is a major step in terms of

• making the research reproducible and
• sharing it with a wider audience

Depending on which environments have been chosen for this initial sharing, the sharing with the wider world is then much less of an effort and may in some cases just mean to tick a box to make the materials public.

This approach is described in more detail in First, design for data sharing.

 

Answer 2

Make the collaboration process visible by using a public collaborative platform like GitHub or a wiki. That way, chances are that others might chime in as well.