Reproducible Research & Open Access Shine at the OSCARRs

March 10, 2025

four people smile at the camera at the Dartmouth OSCARRs

Spotlighting Dartmouth Scholarship

And the envelope, please! We were thrilled to roll out the red carpet for the inaugural Open Scholarship Commitment Award for Reproducible Research (OSCARRs) in February to celebrate community members who represent the best of reproducible research. The award spotlights Dartmouth research projects that embody the essence of reproducible research and open scholarship. “This endeavor speaks to our deep commitment to open and the Dartmouth research enterprise,” Dean of Libraries, Susanne Mehrer, shared at the opening of the ceremony. “It allows us to make academic resources accessible to a global audience while highlighting the world-class research happening at Dartmouth. It also shows how much we can achieve together when a community of experts works in partnership with researchers.”

Whether the focus of that research is in the humanities and social sciences or across STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, those who submitted to the OSCARRs had to demonstrate high-quality open scholarship. This first year, we received 18 entries representing research from anthropology and earth sciences, to computer science and engineering. Judges, including Jennie Chamberlain, Simon Stone, Abigail Murdy, and many others, thrice measured the integrity and success of each application. We were blown away by the diversity both in domains and practices, and we wish we could have awarded everyone!

It was amazing to see all of these submissions not just tack on FAIREST principles as an afterthought, but use them as core values to organize their work.

Simon Stone

The Winners

View Their Research Submissions

It’s more important than ever that the science community contribute to a healthy and thriving research ecosystem/enterprise. I’m proud of the work we’re all doing to normalize openness and reproducibility, which are critical to that ecosystem/enterprise.

Adam Pollack

Open Scholarship

The OSCARRs celebrates Dartmouth researchers' pursuit of Open Scholarship’s ideals. Open Scholarship is an ethos and practice that prioritizes accessibility, accountability, transparency, and inclusivity in the research process. This values-driven approach recognizes that the pursuit of knowledge is a shared endeavor. When scholars can more freely share their work and ideas — and when the public can more easily access high-quality research that has been subject to rigorous peer-review and testing — the benefits of this research maximize for the greater good. Lora Leligdon, co-host of the OSCARRs and Head of Research Facilitation at Dartmouth Libraries adds, “Researchers that follow reproducible and open scholarship practices benefit from greater transparency, higher quality publications, increased compliance with funder and publication mandates, and higher impact.”

At its core, Open Scholarship seeks to democratize access to research outputs, including publications, data, methodologies, and education resources. “Reproducibility opens the door for collaboration so we're not all sitting on data,” shares Miranda Zamarelli, winner of the Graduate Student category, and “instead the data are more available to a broader audience and directly communicated with other scientists.”

Additionally, high-quality, ethical Open Scholarship protects the privacy and rights of research subjects. It emphasizes the responsibility of researchers to build equitable, just, collaborative, and mutually-beneficial relationships with the communities they study, live among, and work in while still protecting the independence of the research process.

Raquel Fleskes talks about her research at the OSCARRs

This aspect of Open Scholarship was evident in Raquel Fleskes' submission, which was awarded an Honorable Mention and voted a crowd favorite at the OSCARRs. She spoke to this point as related to her ongoing research with ancient DNA, “In the last five years, we've seen a growth in better understanding when and how to make something open access or using a shared open access agreement that allows us to be culturally sensitive about data, particularly with human genomic data.”

Pursuit of these principles necessitates improved data curation practices, the focus of the OSCARRs.

FAIREST Data Principles

The best Open Scholarship scholars often practice and advocate for the FAIREST principles of data management and curation. In a data-driven world, the FAIREST principles serve as a framework for researchers to assess the viability and sustainability of the data they generate, analyze, and share. Data often outlasts the creators and users, making it essential for researchers to curate, store, and provide access to this data in ways that facilitate future use. By following these principles, researchers can ensure their data remains relevant and usable long after their initial project concludes.

Implementing reproducible research concepts and tools is a key to the scientific method, allowing others (including future you) to verify, recreate, and build upon research by structuring, organizing, and analyzing your data and code using reproducible best practices.

Lora Leligdon

Adam Pollack talks about his research at the OSCARRs

For Adam Pollack, a climate risk researcher and winner in the Early Career category, he's working to bridge the gap between curated data and knowledge and ensuring open access to it. “So many positive contributions to building societally useful knowledge about climate risks comes from a long tradition of open science. For example, much of our knowledge about changes in Earth systems comes from enormous collaborative efforts worldwide because [scientists and researchers] are sharing their data and being deeply transparent about their methods and said data. That culture of openness, transparency, and reusability is sorely needed in the climate risk space.”

Reproducible Research @ Dartmouth

The Libraries and Research Computing @ ITC partnered to form a reproducible research community of practice at Dartmouth in 2019. Integrating research data management, research computing, and open data science and scholarship, the Reproducible Research Group coordinates research support and training events, so researchers at all levels can learn the foundational skills needed to produce reliable and reproducible computationally-intensive scholarship.

The group also advises on development of research infrastructure, tools, and services, such as Dataverse, text and data analysis platforms, and other research support services usable across all disciplines. RR@D offers dozens of workshops each term, along with multi-day intensive intersession events that provide in-depth training in programming, data visualization, computational text analysis, and more.

The OSCARRs — competition and ceremony — was organized by Lilly Linden, Elaina Vitale, Jeremy Mikecz, and Carly Bobak (ITC) in partnership with Reproducible Research @ Dartmouth. The competition, judging, and final award ceremony were a year in the making. It’s partnerships and collaborations like this one that bring Dartmouth research into the limelight and our collective awareness, helping to fulfill and further Dartmouth’s research mission. We thank all of our awardees — and Casey Dowdle, PhD math student, who accepted Weishi Wang's award on his behalf — and guests for joining the celebrations.