Frequently Asked Questions

1. Who are ReproHacks aimed at?

Events are aimed at anyone writing or supporting those writing academic papers that are based on computational analyses and wish to learn more about how to make them more reproducible. It's also aimed at authors who want to showcase they're effort into making their work reproducible.


2. What happens at these events

During a ReproHack, participants attempt to reproduce published research of their choice from a list of proposed papers with publicly available associated code and data. Throughout the day, there's opportunity to regroup and discuss progress and participants are encouraged to record their experiences on a number of key aspects, including reproducibility, transparency and reusability of materials and at the end of the session to provide feedback to the authors.


3. Why people should attend

ReproHacks offer a low pressure environment to work on real published materials instead of just simplified dummy examples. It also provides a space for authors to put their papers to the reproducibility test and get constructive and feedback on their work.


4. What do you learn from the event?

Participants get practical experience in reproducibility and opportunity to explore what different approaches to reproducibility look like and what they achieve. They'll also get an appreciation that while reproducibility is non trivial, opening up work for more people to engage with is the best way to help improve it. They'll also see that reproducibility has community value beyond just the validation of the results by increasing engagement with the research itself.

Authors also stand to benefit from getting feedback on how reproducible, transparent and reusable their work is, appreciation for their efforts and opportunity to engage others with their research.