CW14 Discussion sessions

Discussion sessions are a fundamental part of the Collaborations Workshop and help people work on solving shared problems and learn about new ideas. On this page, you will find both the discussion topics and a record of the sessions.

Attendees at Hackathon Co-Afina 2023

Categories of CW14 discussion topics

The following questions will be run before, during and after the workshop. You can tweet and answer using our special hashtag - #CW14repro - and by linking to longer articles.

  • What is reproducible research?
  • How does your domain support reproducibility?
  • What programming languages are best suited for reproducible research and why?

When discussing these questions or linking to relevant materials, the #CW14strat hashtag needs to be used.

  • How do you know your research is reproducible?
  • How do you use software tools to make your work reproducible?
  • How best to encourage people to adopt reproducibility?
  • How should researchers be trained in producing reproducible research?
  • How does reproducibility fit in with incomplete, scattered or flawed data?
  • Is engineering for long-term reproducible research a good thing idea, and why?
  • What is and should be the role of code review in research?
  • Are research software engineers doomed to obsoletion, and why?
  • What should research dissemination models look like in the future (how do we get beyond the publication)?

The hashtag for this topic is #CW14manage and can be used to address the following questions:

  • What software tools or development infrastructures help researchers achieve reproducible research?
  • Are notebook/labbooks style tools, such as IPython Notebook or  Labtrove, useful tools to improve reproducibility?
  • Which aspects of reproducibility are most important for assessing research?
  • How do we publish research in a reproducible manner when GUI tools are used ?
  • What is the best way to train producers of good software documentation, and why is this important?
  • How do we improve bad software?
  • What problems should Recomputation.org address?
  • Is successful research that uses excellent software testing practices really possible?
  • What are the best practices for domain-based and institutional data management for supporting reproducible research ?
  • What is the minimum standard of quality for research software that we should expect?
  • How do you match users with developers of research software?
  • How might a public repository of knowledge benefit the research community and aide reproducibility?
  • How do you make a case for funding a full-time software developer in RCUK and EU funding calls?

Lastly, those who'd like to discuss issues related to best practice in software reproducibility can discuss this via the #CW14pract hashtag.

  • How are tools such as Github, iPython Notebook and RStudio being used to practice reproducible science?
  • Does software such as Sweave or KnitR allow people to produce reproducible outputs or just replicable ones?
  • What data visualisation tools are used in research and how does their use relate to reproducibility?
  • How do you construct reproducible analysis after using standard research processes?
  • How do good software development practices aide reproducible research?
  • How can automatic provisioning of software and applications aid reproducibility?
  • Are ontologies useful in producing reproducible research?
  • What’s the best way to access domain specific resources and is this reproducible?
  • What programming languages, language features and paradigms support reproducibility?
  • How do we completely describe a piece of code, so that it will be executable not only today or next year, but in a hundred years' time as well?
  • What are the current must-use standards for publishing and reproducible research?

If you have a topic you would like discussed at the Collaborations Workshop 2014 (CW14) please contact us by email.

Note - discussion topics above are mostly based on suggestions from those registered to attend CW14.