The Open Science Innovation Award for 2025 has been awarded
Aaron Peikert and his team were honoured for their work on the workshop on reproducibility in data analysis
The Institute is sending out a strong signal for transparency and reproducibility in research. “Implementing open science practices involves a considerable amount of work, but our researchers at all career stages integrate these practices into their daily work because they want to be open and transparent about their research”, explains Ralph Hertwig, Director of the Center for Adaptive Rationality and Managing Director of the Institute. “With this award, we want to recognise these researchers and the many ways in which they are making their work more accessible, transparent, and reproducible.”
Aaron Peikert and his team consisting of Hannes Diemerling, Andreas M. Brandmaier and Maximilian S. Ernst, researchers at the Center for Lifespan Psychology, received the Open Science Innovation Award for their collaboration on a practice-oriented workshop on reproducibility in data analysis.
The workshop provides knowledge in the areas of dynamic document creation, workflow orchestration, containerisation, version control and continuous delivery, and offers participants a consistently reproducible workflow. Participants first learn how code can become an integral and dynamic part of scientific documents. They then learn how these documents can be version-controlled and how the software environment can be frozen. Finally, they learn how this workflow can automatically reflect changes in code, data or text, regardless of the device.
The workshop has already been held over 20 times, including at the DagStat conference, the Berlin-Oxford Summer School on Open and Responsible Research, the Neuroscience School of Advanced Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Humboldt University in Berlin, the University of Basel, SIPS and several IMPRS. Almost a thousand researchers have participated.
‘By combining education, research and tool development, the award winners have created a workshop that is well suited for adapting open science practices and at the same time significantly reduces the implementation effort for scientists from different disciplines,’ was the jury's verdict.
In his acceptance speech, Aaron Peikert emphasised the advantages of the workshop. These mainly consist of the fact that the workshop can be conducted efficiently thanks to its modular learning format, and that it can be adapted to the participants' individual pace. Many of the techniques originally come from software development, but are also essential for science. In order to promote their use in everyday research, it is necessary to provide more than just papers or talks, but concrete invitations to implement the techniques are required. This is where the workshop comes in. Its aim is to spark participants' curiosity, provide them with some initial practical experience, and demonstrate what is possible.
Open Science is a movement that has established itself in numerous scientific fields in recent years to make research results freely and easily accessible. Transparent processes enable researchers to review published results or to evaluate already collected data in the context of new questions. The Research Data Management & Open Science working group led by Maike Kleemeyer was set up at the Institute for this purpose. The group, which consists of 20 members from different research areas, organizational units, and career levels, meets every 10 weeks to discuss new developments and exchange findings.
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