Every two years, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) publishes in College & Research Libraries News an article on the top trends and issues affecting academic libraries and the change our institutions are experiencing. We are highlighting some of these trends through blog posts over this academic year, including: supporting student well-being post-pandemic; open access and equitable publishing; AI and AI literacy; open science and reproducibility; open pedagogy and instructional design; and disrupting and reconceiving collection practices.

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Happy Open Education Week! To celebrate the occasion, let us take a look at open science and reproducibility, and how libraries and organizations are working on advancing it.

Open science is “a set of principles and practices that aim to make scientific research from all fields accessible to everyone for the benefits of scientists and society as a whole” (UNESCO).  For researchers to make their work open science, they need to plan, conduct, and publish their research with an intent for it to be openly available. When considering how to make scholarship align with open science, consider the UNESCO graphic on values and principles of open science, pictured on the right. The graphic mentions values and principles like equity and fairness and transparency, scrutiny, critique, and reproducibility. Thinking about the relevant values and principles of open science throughout the research process will ensure that your research is available to communities. 

In addition to ensuring research is accessible to all through an open science approach, it is essential that the research can be reproduced by others in the field. Reproducibility “refers to the ability of a researcher to duplicate the results of a prior study using the same materials and procedures as were used by the original investigator” (Bollen et al., 2015, p. 3). This means that information that is published using an open science model should also include relevant information that will allow researchers to match the results of the original study. To ensure this can happen, researchers need to make sure that all the materials and procedures used to conduct their study are available to other researchers that want to replicate the study.

Open Science and Libraries

Libraries have been partnering with other libraries and organizations to produce resources and scholarship that fosters open science. One such partnership is the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS), which came about from the work of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship. This group consists of more than 60 American colleges and universities, which work together to support open scholarship. Based on this work,  HELIOS assisted the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on a workshop that introduced an open science toolkit. The workshop proceedings and the toolkit was published as Developing a Toolkit for Fostering Open Science Practices: Proceedings of a Workshop (2021). This workshop investigated what was needed to build up open science and how to meet those needs. The elements discussed to promote open science are:

• Open Science Imperative.
• Open Science Signaling Language Template and Rubric. 
• Good Practices Primers. These concise guides offer policy makers a high-level overview of open sharing.
• Open Science by the Numbers Infographic. 
• Open Science Success Stories Database. 
• Reimagining Outputs Worksheet.

  

This toolkit is useful at the administration level of institutions for helping promote open science practices in their communities.

Another organization is LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries. LIBER has prioritized developing open science, and has resources that can help people get started with open science. One LIBER working group, Digital Skills for Library Staff & Researchers Working Group, created a few resources on visualizing open science skills. The image on the right was created by this working group, and provides five major skills needed to practice open science. Each of the five skills lists what needs to be done to achieve them. For example, the skill ‘research integrity’ asks for information and data literacy and digital content creation as two ways to ensure research integrity. When considering how to make your research open, the LIBER Open Science Skills graphic can guide researchers on the different parts needed. 

Reproducibility 

Alongside open science is the need for reproducibility. Libraries need to consider how they can support reproducibility. Librarians should work with stakeholders to build a community that works towards reproducibility, develops and improves research infrastructure, and promotes reproducibility and the skills needed to implement it (Schmidt et al., 2023, p. 12). This means building meaningful relationships with partners that work with the library and its resources, and providing services that support reproducibility.

Many libraries already support some reproducibility, whether they explicitly state this. Mark MacEachern, librarian at Taubman Health Sciences Library, and Sara Samuel, University of Michigan, interviewed 11 medical and health sciences librarians. They noted that the librarians rarely described services using research reproducibility vocabulary, but they describe a ton of research reproducibility resources concepts. Some resources and concepts that are mentioned include:

• Data catalogs
• Data Repositories
• Open Access
• R
• Tableau

These are not all the resources and concepts that MacEachern and Samuel mention. However, these examples illustrate how librarians’ assistance to patrons often help to ensure reproducibility. While not using vocabulary related to reproducibility, librarians still support it through a variety of ways including data collection and providing access to software.

The Oregon Health & Science University Library has played a significant role in promoting reproducibility by contributing to the Resource Identification Initiative, which helps researchers cite key resources in biomedical research through the creation of Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs). RRIDs “are ID numbers assigned to help researchers cite key resources (antibodies, model organisms and software projects) in the biomedical literature to improve transparency of research methods.” To the right is an example of an RRID identifier for an influenza B virus organism in the RRID Portal. It provides an ID number, links to metadata about the organism, and allows users to copy a citation of the RRID.  By creating these unique identifiers for resources, it makes it easier for scientists to cite their work, and when researchers are trying to find important resources related to a project, the RRIDs will make it easier to find the relevant information. When other researchers go to replicate a study, they can use the RRID portal to help compile relevant sources to recreate the study. Thus making it easier to replicate the original study’s results.

Conclusion

Continuing to push scholarship towards open science and reproducibility will accelerate research and allow for more information and breakthroughs to occur. Libraries are useful in providing the tools and services needed to build research with open science in mind. Libraries already supply many tools that assist reproducibility, such as data repositories. When developing your research, check in with your library to see what resources they have to support open science and reproducibility.

Benjamin Cushing is a Research and Instruction Librarian at The Catholic University of America Libraries. 

References 

Arrison, T., Saunders, J., & Kameyama, E. (2021). Developing a Toolkit for Fostering Open Science Practices. The National Academies Press. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/26308/chapter/1 

Bollen, Kenneth, et al. (2015). Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Perspectives on Robust and Reliable Science. Report of the Subcommittee on Replicability in Science Advisory Committee to the National Science Foundation Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences.

Gainey, M. A., Griego, C., & Scotti, K. (2024). From the lab to librarianship: Advancing open science. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, 108. 

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Policy and Global Affairs; Committee on Science, Engineering, Medicine, and Public Policy, et al. (2019). Reproducibility and Replicability in Science. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US). May 7. 

UNESCO. UNESCO Open Science. Accessed February 28, 2025.