ReproHacks at OpenCon satellite events

ReproHacks started out as part of OpenCon satellite events (Berlin 2016, London 2017) and inspired by Owen Petchey's Reproducible Research in Ecology, Evolution, Behaviour, and Environmental Studies course, where students attempt to recreate published results from raw data, over a few months and multiple sessions. We only had one day for our ReproHacks though, so we set the challenge to be, to reproduce a paper from published data AND code.

Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship

After a short hiatus and as calls for reproducibility increased, the project was resurrected as part of Anna Krystalli's 2019 Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship which supported the running of a series of ReproHacks, beginning with a session at the CarpentryConnect Manchester.

Leiden ReproHack

In the meantime, interest in running such events was picking up with the most comprehensive effort to date being made by a group of RLadies in the Netherlands around a flagship ReproHack at Leiden University. The group had full support of their institution and with much enthusiasm managed to run a highly successful event that garnered the biggest crowd at a ReproHack to date!

ReproHack Team formation

The succesful Leiden event also lead to the formation of the core team around the project with the aim of providing support and developing infrastructure to support others in running their own ReproHacks.

Support from the N8 CIR & ReproHack Northern Tour

Remote ReproHack

The disappointment of having to cut the N8 Northern Tour short though only pushed us to work on an idea we'd been discussing from the start of the project, running a remote ReproHack!

The event offered us the opportunity to make up for the lost event, but the getting rid of the location constraint allowed us to open the event up to more participants and invite exciting speakers to complement the practical element of the day.

Despite the timezone differences, we were joined by participants and speakers from across Europe and even as far as the US and Japan and proved that not only would a remote model work but that from some perspectives could even offer a better experience.

ReproHack at LatinR - The first ReproHack in Spanish!

Following the success of the Remote ReproHack and now having a blueprint for a succesfull remote ReproHack event, the next stop was LatinR 2020, where core team member Florencia D'Andrea took a lead on an event run exclusively in Spanish!

Apart from being another fun and productive event with more exciting contributions from a variety of speakers, it was also the first example of bilingual materials for running the event.

Leiden ReproHack wins the Open Initiatives Trophy at Open Science Festival NL!

ReproHack Hub Launch

If you are reading this, it means we've hit our biggest milestone yet, the development and launch of the ReproHack hub! We've designed it as a place where the community can coordinate all ReproHack activities. From here, authors will be able to submit papers for review at any time, organisers will be able to register their events though a simple form and partcipants will be able to submit their reviews!

We hope this will facilitate and help normalise the activity of research code reviewing to the point where one day, it will be so embedded in research culture that we will be obsolete. Until then though, we encourage all those interested in practicing reproducible research to use the hub to organise events, submit papers and submit your reviews. For any feedback on the hub as well as bug reports, feel free to use our issue tracker on GitHub or get in touch with us via slack.