Report on the First International Workshop on Reproducible Open Science

Abstract

In the last decade, information and communication technology (ICT) advances have deeply affected the scientific process, which increasingly produces and relies on digital research products, such as publications, datasets, experiments, websites, software, blogs, etc. Accordingly, scientific communication has started mutating in order to adapt its mission (and business models) to such new scientific paradigms and benefit from the unprecedented Open Science opportunities that may arise from them: reproducibility, i.e., the ability of repeating a digital experiment and reusing its constituent products; and transparent evaluation, i.e., the ability of (i) effectively evaluating scientific experiments by means of reproducibility and (ii) assigning fine-grained scientific reward, based on effective authorship across the overall scientific process. Scientists, research institutions, and funders are pushing for innovative Open Science scholarly communication workflows (i.e., submission, peer-review, access, reuse, citation, and scientific reward), marrying a holistic approach where publishing includes in principle any digital product resulting from a research activity that is relevant to the evaluation and reproducibility of the activity or part of it. Defining, taking up, and supporting Open Science publishing workflows become urgent challenges, to be addressed by ICT solutions capable of fostering and driving radical changes in the way science is developed and disseminated. The goal of the first International Workshop on Reproducible Open Science1 was to provide a forum for constructively exploring foundational, orga-