Open Science and Research Software Engineering: Building Blocks for Quality Research
Institutskolloquium
- Datum: 11.04.2025
- Uhrzeit: 10:30 - 12:00
- Vortragende: Dr. Heidi Seibold
- Dr. Heidi Seibold is co-founder co-executive director of the Digital Research Academy, a trainer network focused on Open Science, Data Literacy and Research Software Engineering. Her research used to be at the intersection of statistics, machine learning and medicine, before wandering into the field of Open Science. She left her academic career in 2021 to pursue her passion of helping researchers improve the quality of their research through good scientific practices and Open Science. She is in the steering group of the German Reproducibility Network and initiated the Open Science Retreat, an unconference that is in its third year now. Heidi writes a successful newsletter on open and reproducible data science with >2000 subscribers and has been involved in various podcast productions. Heidi is an avid cyclist and hiker and tries to avoid cars and airplanes as much as possible.
- Ort: IPP Garching
- Raum: Arnulf-Schlüter Lecture Hall in Building D2 and Zoom
- Gastgeber: IPP
- Kontakt: stefan.possanner@ipp.mpg.de
While we keep celebrating and promoting research excellence, we all know that research and academia are plagued by systemic problems that lead to outputs that fall short of what we would call "excellent". The reproducibility crisis in many fields as well as scientific fraud cases are just the tip of the iceberg. One aim of Open Science is to address these quality issues by promoting transparency, collaboration, and rigorous methods that foster reproducibility and accountability.
In computational fields, the conversation must extend beyond the quality of papers and data to code and software. Practices such as version control, automation, testing, continuous integration, and environment stabilization not only improve code quality but also make the code easier to maintain and to collaborate among increasingly distributed teams.
In this talk, I will explore the intersection of Open Science and research software engineering. I will outline practical strategies and best practices that researchers can adopt to elevate the quality of their code and, by extension, the overall quality of their research.