OpenCon Berlin hackathon

We are all excited by the progress made by many to make their papers fully reproducible by publishing code and data. We know how challenging it can be so we want to showcase the value of the practice, both for original authors and and as a learning experience for the reproducers.

Inspired be Owen Petchey’s Reproducible Research in Ecology, Evolution, Behaviour, and Environmental Studies course, where students attempt to reproduce the analysis and figures of a paper from the raw data, we want to attempt to do the same. While they take a few months over a number of sessions, we only have a day so instead we’ll be trying to do the same but with papers that have also published code.

What we love about this approach, and why we think it fits well in the space of a hack, is that it provides a low-pressure environment to begin to actually get stuck into some reprodicibility. Attempting reproduction provides an opportunity to test how reproducible papers are ‘out of the box’, enabling evaluation of how successful current practices are, and potentially identifying their most pressing weaknessess.

This is by no means an an attempt to defame the writers and consent by authors will be sought and involvement is encourgaed. We see reproduction as useful scientific activitiy in itself, with useful outcomes for the science in the papers themselves. We hope to provide useful feedback to authors if we encounter difficulties and ofcourse spread the word on successful reproductions.

Further details can be found here: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/OpenConBerlin2016

We will be running the hackathon in collaboration with Overleaf and PaperHive, two epic collaboration platforms that we can use to assist with the hack.