How to be Open about your Science?

Julia Romanowska

2023-01-30

Discussion

go to www.menti.com and type the code:

8412 8963

Questions in Mentimeter:

• What do you associate with “Open Science”? (word cloud)
• What do you practice? (order several activities)

Additionally:
have you used data from published studies?
if so, how did you go about acquiring those?

You know and actively pursue many of the Open Science actions. However, do you know how to share data correctly? We’re going to focus on that today.

Open Data

• not only raw input data!

We’re usually not allowed to share our input data, if these come from health surveys, health registries, MoBa, genetic measurements, etc.

However, we can always share something!

• all results

Have you considered what to include in a paper where the space is limited? Have you ever thought about how “open” this is?

What did you do with all the other results you produced? How about just sharing all that your analyses give out and the code you used to obtain these?

• accessible by anyone

So you’ve created many tables and published them in supplementary material? Wonderful! Have you ever thought about how “open” this is?

Example

Look at these files:

1. Word document with a stylized table - nice to watch, not nice to work with
2. Excel spreadsheet with two tables in one sheet
3. CSV file and meta-data

The first two are in extras folder, the last ones are on GitHub repo.

Questions:

Which one do you prefer?

Which one is easiest to incorporate in analyses as input?

Which one is easiest to open?

Exercise

1. export to a text-file

2. create a table in R/STATA

3. describe your data

4. put on GitHub/Dataverse

Good practice

1. Share all that you can share

2. Describe your data

3. Create text-files, not Excel or Word

4. (*) Public repository