Over the past decade, the concept of ‘open science’ — that is, all parts of research are accessible by anyone — had exploded in popularity. Numerous facets of preexisting research papers were found to be non-reproducible, much less replicable, whether due to non-deterministic behavior, missing components, or simply typographical errors. There were also numerous cases of researchers being unable to release their work such that others may build off or improve the existing or their own work.
Now, since then, there had been numerous posts on how to best improve reproducibility and make research more accessible. When I began looking at these topics in detail in my third year as a doctoral student in the Autumn of 2022, about 7 months from this post, I found numerous resources, explanations, and tutorials reviewing all of these concepts such that those familiar or unfamiliar with computer science could easily interpret and implement them. They were quite useful in providing a high level understanding of all these topics (though I wish I thought about documenting the location of these resources sooner). However, there was a lack of nuance within these resources when it came to very specific scenarios that I thought would be useful to have mentioned in one place or another.
So, I made this to provide my current and future experiences on improving open science and reproducibility. As I typically discovered concepts as I encountered them, I felt a book or a documentation page to be less fitting in providing these discoveries I stumbled upon. Additionally, I wanted this to be like a narrative towards figuring out these concepts on the reader’s own. As such, I decided to do this in a blog style format. Substack seemed like a good way to keep people informed of my posts (as long as I don’t set up the paywall) and looked relatively nice to read on computers and mobile devices. If I find that Substack isn’t all that great for this purpose, I’ll look for a separate service in the future and migrate the posts as necessary.
I’ll try to post my discoveries in a timely manner and answer any questions I receive. Hopefully, you, as the reader, are able to gain some useful insight into how to make your work more open, if possible, and reproducible in the future through my experiences.