Reproducibility audits as a vehicle to teach reproducibility

[pschloss]

I've been toying with an experiment of running a reproducibility audit of the microbiome research community. The questions would include assessing the accessibility of the raw data and whether a generic microbiome scientist could regenerate the original results. Aside from the scientific angle of this, I think it might be an interesting way to recruit a bunch of people to do a project and with them captive, train them to do a better job of making their analyses reproducible.

[hlapp]

I like this and I think we could learn a lot from the results. The way I have been thinking about this is Reproducibility Audits as a service provided by informatics/bioinformatics support cores. Such a service would come before rather than after publication, and would come with assistance to improve reproducibility if it is found lacking. I think this is a real opportunity for IT or bioinformatics experts to help scientists master the technology soup.