Emerging roles and responsibilities in support of reproducible science: A multi-stakeholder exercise
Creators: name: Schmidt, Birgit
name: Loffreda, Lucia
name: Sondervan, Jeroen
name: Chiarelli, Andrea
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: Research reproducibility
Open Science
Scholarly publishing
Research data management

description: Abstract for Charleston Conference 2022, presented on 2 November 2022 Securing the reproducibility of research is a multi-stakeholder effort with challenges and opportunities for individual researchers and research communities, librarians, publishers, funders and service providers. These emerge at various steps of the research cycle, and in particular at the publication stage. Between 2020 and 2021, Knowledge Exchange (KE) has investigated the publication of reproducible research outputs, with support from a group of international open science experts. The output of this work was a public report, which was based on an extensive review of almost 130 sources and a mix of interviews and focus groups with 51 stakeholders from 12 countries. In this landscape review, we have considered stakeholders at the micro, meso and macro level based on the KE Open Scholarship Framework, including researchers and research groups, their disciplinary communities and institutions as the content creators (micro level), academic libraries and their institutions as well as publishers and infrastructure providers in supporting and strategic roles (meso level), and last but not least research funders and policymakers as those who the influence the broader environment and set requirements (meta level). Our presentation will seek to untangle the growing intricacies in the research reproducibility landscape, which is evolving as the convergence of the open access, open data, open source and open infrastructure discussions. In this context, we will discuss the important role of research libraries, publishers and other stakeholders when it comes to research reproducibility, which includes not only the advice they ‘traditionally’ provide, but also an ever-broadening range of tools and workflows that span from choosing an online repository to preparing research compendia. In particular, research libraries have taken up innovative roles, such as the ‘data librarians/stewards’ that are becoming more common across Europe and the ‘reproducibility librarians’ that are emerging in the USA and operate at the interface between the various facets of open science. The role of libraries and research support services with regard to reproducibility is also changing in terms of digital infrastructures. Researchers require more and more support in navigating the fast-paced world of technological solutions emerging to support open science practices, thus leading to uncertainty and a constant need to upskill both support staff and the researcher base. Whether internally or in partnership with external providers, research libraries also continue to develop institutional repositories, which can be interconnected with a web of digital objects to enable reproducible research to take place. Finally, the broader context of the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the role of research reproducibility in enabling trust in the published record. Research libraries can play a dual role in this regard, as they can be both the custodians of research objects and advisers to local academics who seek to work in a reproducible way and enhance the quality of their institution’s publications. In the session we would like to discuss further how librarians, publishers and other stakeholders can further the practices and services which enable reproducibility, e.g. How are the changing disciplinary practices addressed and how can policies, incentives and technologies support them? What are the current challenges and how might they be addressed? What other actions and strategies are applied or are needed?