Open collaboration practices within scientific research: Where we are, where we should be, and how to get there

• Protocol DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/K9DR5

The overall aim of the Science Collective is to build a technical and social environment that encourages and makes it easy for science to be done in an open, rigorous, and collaborative way. Since scientific research now almost always requires working with other people. With the increasing emphasis on and demand for science to be more open, how we collaborate is a key component to making science more easily open from the start of any project. But how do we collaborate in an open and transparent way? What are the best practices and tools we can use reported in the scientific literature? What is an ideal collaborative workflow and how close or far are we from this ideal in reality? This project aims to address some of these questions.

Our three general outputs for this project are:

1. A scoping review looking for knowledge on current best practices and how researchers collaborate presently.

   • Largely this is to map out the space and provide a list of resources for ourselves and others to learn what we already do or know about collaborating.
   • The scoping review is more than just the review itself, but also the way we work together and the code we use to do the tasks for the output.
   • A side aim is to make this output as automated as possible using R code to extract and present the results into a website format.

2. An opinionated and theoretical paper on what an ideal open collaboration workflow and setup should look like.

3. A comparison of where we are right now and where we should be, and how we can start moving towards the ideal.

Another output(s) we are considering to include:

• A survey sent out determining what researchers and research groups currently do for collaboration.

Brief description of the folder and file contents

The following folders contain:

• data/: Contains the processed and extracted reference and resource lists for the scoping review.
• data-raw/: Contains the raw data obtained from the first pass of the scoping review.
• doc/: Contains the documents for the review, protocol, and the other output documents.
• R/: R scripts for extracting the references for the scoping review as well as for project management.

Installing and updating sources

You'll need to install all the packages for this project with (while inside the R Project):

# install.packages("renv")
renv::restore()

And to rebuild the sources (which can take some time), run:

# To start from scratch, uncomment code below
# targets::tar_destroy()
targets::tar_make()

Contributing to this project

If you are interested in contributing, read our contributing guidelines for more details on how and what you can do.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the scoping-review project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.