Slides – Gabriel Strain – Open Research Conference 2024

Slides used by Gabriel Strain for the University of Manchester Open Research Conference 2024

Title: Reproducibility Lifecycles in PhD Research

Abstract: To facilitate a culture of Open Research, it is crucial that practices of openness, transparency, and reproducibility are embedded as early as possible in future academic leader’s careers. Despite a rapid cultural shift towards encouraging these practices, many PhD candidates feel that they do not have the tools, knowledge, and support to be able to incorporate them into their workflows. To this end, I present my own PhD experience as a case study. Having been introduced to the concept of Open Research during my master’s degree, I was encouraged to implement OR practices from the moment I began postgraduate research. This included pre-registration of hypotheses, experimental design, and analysis plans, the use of open source tools for data collection, and the writing of containerised executable papers with dynamic figure generation, statistics, and modelling. In this talk I aim to shine a light on the quirks and peculiarities of these practices; I hope that academics and future leaders at the start of their careers may benefit from the examples I give, and ultimately put open research into practice in more efficient ways than I have done. To demonstrate my workflow, I also present a reproducible University of Manchester thesis template that employs a range of open research practices and tools.