The Role of Libraries in Supporting Reproducibility

Last updated on 2023-11-01 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

  • What is the role of libraries in research improvement?
  • How can library staff support researchers in improving reproducibility?

Objectives

  • demonstrate understanding of libraries’ central role in supporting reproducibility
  • provide examples of how libraries can support research reproducibility and its improvement

Why Libraries?

Academic libraries are uniquely positioned to provide support in the area of reproducible research. Open science is already at the core of many libraries’ work and many librarians provide direct and increasingly hands-on support to both early career and senior researchers at their institutions. Because reproducibility is strongly associated with open science/open research and because funders, journals, and other stakeholders begin to implement new requirements for not only open but also reproducible research, librarians can build on their expertise in helping preparing research outputs for sharing to also help make them reproducible.

Reproducibility support from the libraries

Where can libraries help:

  • Awareness raising, teaching, training, and hands-on guidance
  • Help researchers being transparent about their full research workflow: research questions, methods, data, step-by-step procedures and analyses; help making the methods, data and analyses open (if possible in a given project)
  • Assist with making good documentation for all outputs and all stages of the research process
  • Assist with version control to track of versions of all outputs
  • Help with the quality check of the methods, data and analyses
  • Verifying researchers’ work: helping with reproducing their own results

Exercise (Reflection)

What do you think is the most important area where libraries can provide support in making research more reproducible?

Key Points

  • Academic libraries are uniquely positioned to provide help and support in the area of open and reproducible research
  • Academic librarians can build on their expertise in making research outputs shareable and reusable to also help make them reproducible
  • Academic libraries can offer training in reproducible research workflows in addition to open science trainings