KE Publishing Reproducible Research Outputs

Research Consulting was commissioned by Knowledge Exchange (KE) to explore current practices and barriers in the area of research reproducibility, with a focus on the publication and dissemination stage in the research process. KE is a partnership of six key national organisations within Europe tasked with developing infrastructure and services to enable the use of digital technologies to improve higher education and research: CSC in Finland, CNRS in France, DeiC in Denmark, DFG in Germany, Jisc in the UK and SURF in the Netherlands. 

Our task was to determine how technical and social infrastructures could support future developments to support reproducible publication practices, working closely with a task and finish group of open science and reproducibility experts.  

In this project, we captured the views of research funding organisations, research performing organisations, learned societies, researchers, academic publishers and infrastructure and service providers from around the world. The KE Open Scholarship Framework was a useful tool to inform the design and delivery of all components of our research, which included a comprehensive literature review and a series of interviews and focus groups with a total of 51 contributors. 

Our findings sought to compare and inspire strategies, policies and operational practice and share lessons learned from a wide range of stakeholder groups. We concluded that reproducibility is seen as being part of the long-term vision for open science and that acknowledging disciplinary variation and diversity in research practices will have to be prioritised to achieve buy in from all players involved.