BITSS Director Jen Sturdy and Catalyst Stephanie Wykstra wrote a blog post about an open science workshop co-hosted by BITSS and IPA in Kenya earlier this year. In it, they situate the workshop within the larger transparency movement and put forth some important questions for researchers to consider as they construct their workflows:

• “As a study progresses, are you keeping track of versions of your code used to clean and construct variables and to analyze data, ideally using software such as git?
• Are you leaving comments in your code and/or naming files to make it clear which parts of the code produce tables in your paper?
• Are you labeling variables clearly so that you can understand them later and others can reuse them when the data is publicly shared?
• Have you considered what de-identification of the data may be required to share it publicly? How might these efforts affect replication of your analysis if you can only provide access to a de-identified public-use data file?
• Have you considered storing your materials in an established repository such as Dataverse or OSF, rather than on your own website, to make them more widely accessible? (If materials are archived in a repository rather than a researcher’s website, they will be stored sustainably and will receive a unique digital object identifier so that others can cite the data and other materials if they use them.)”

Read the entire post on the Association for Psychological Science Observer website here.