First steps towards a FAIR-er and more efficient research: version control systems, public engagement, and open development

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre 

You recently read about the best next approach to analyse your latest data, but it takes you four weeks to code the analysis, and at the end of the day it does not really work out. Or maybe - hooray! - the authors declared that all their code is available online, and you find it, just to discover a very intricate bunch of lines without much instructions. You work for months on a data analysis, just to find out that someone, somewhere, published a toolbox to get results in a heartbeat a while back, but it was not findable. Worse, you spend a great deal of time developing the next revolutionary neuroscientific discovery and ending with little to no engagement from the community at large. Are these scenarios familiar? And aren’t they incredibly frustrating?
Under the requests of many journals and funding bodies, our science is becoming more and more open and reproducible, but there is still quite some work to do to achieve complete FAIRness - that is the work needed to move from producing deliverables for oneself to producing deliverables for everyone. Luckily, there are paths of least resistance to get there.
In this talk we will cover the first steps towards better findable, accessible, and reusable deliverables, as well as towards improving their external engagement through open development principles. After an introduction of version control systems (git) and related public platforms (github, gitlab, …), we will discuss a few simple practices to improve our code and text based deliverables for better reusability, starting with documentation and styling. With the power of automation, we will discuss how to improve the findability and accessibility of our deliverables, and we will briefly discuss licenses. After covering tools like Auto, pre-commit, read the docs, Zenodo, and many others, we will discuss the hurdles and gains of open and community development, and how a little extra energy can lead to great collaborations and more scientific engagement with our work. Not a fan of open development and collaboration? Not a problem: the same practices we will discuss in this context can be used to improve the interpersonal and intergenerational interaction of single laboratories and institutions.