Open Science Support at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL. The EnviDat Concept

Descrizione

This poster was originally created for the swissuniversities Open Science Action Plan: Kick-Off Forum, and showed to the audience on 17.10.2019. It illustrates how the environmental data portal EnviDat provides the tools for fostering Open Science and Reproducibility of scientific research at WSL.

Supporting open science is a highly relevant user requirement for EnviDat and for implementing FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) principles at dataset level. EnviDat encourages WSL scientists to complement data publication with a complete description of research methods and the inclusion of the open source software, code or scripts used for processing the dataset or for obtaining the published results. By openly publishing open software (e.g. as Jupyter notebooks) alongside research data sets, researchers can contribute to mitigate reproducibility issues.

EnviDat also promotes and supports, where possible and practical, the publication of software as Jupyter notebooks. Jupyter notebooks provide a solution for improved documentation and interactive execution of open code in a wide range of programming languages (Python, R, Octave/Matlab, Java or Scala). These programming languages are widely used in environmental research at WSL and well supported by the Jupyter-compatible kernels. We have sucessfully interfaced EnviDat-hosted notebooks with the WSL High-Performance Computing (HPC) Linux Cluster through a JupyterHub/JuypterLab beta installation on the HPC cluster implemented in close collaboration with the WSL IT-Services. For existing software that cannot be easily migrated to Jupyter Notebooks, the Open Science and Reproducibility is assisted by containerisation. We have proven that several Singularity containers can successfully run on WSL's HPC cluster.

Finally, the researchers can upload the data/results complemented by code (e.g. as Jupyter Notebooks, or Singularity containers) and any additional documentation in EnviDat. Consequently, they will receive a DOI for the entire dataset, which they can reference in their science paper in order to publish a more reproducible research.

License: This poster is released by WSL and the EnviDat team to the public domain under a Creative Commons 4.0 CC0 "No Rights Reserved" international license. You can reuse this poster in any way you want, for any purposes and without restrictions.