During the AGILE 2017 conference in Wageningen, a small group of 7 researcher (see pic) gathered to discuss about issues and strategies for reproducible research in the geoscience domain. Based on the results of that first workshop (a second workshop followed, see http://o2r.info/reproducible-agile/ and http://geotec.uji.es/2018/07/09/takeaways-of-the-reproducible-research-publication-at-agile2018/), we elaborated a list of action points which ended with a submission of a full paper to AGILE 2018 conference. Due to a series of unfortunate circumstances, our conference paper was rejected and then resubmitted to PeerJ as a journal article entitled “Reproducible research and GIScience: an evaluation using AGILE conference papers”. This piece of work contains an analysis of the actual level of reproducibility of a set of nominated papers for best full paper and best short paper over the last ten AGILE conferences. It also represents our thoughts and common understanding about this crucial theme, reproducible research, in the GIScience field.

The nice story behind this paper and the ongoing collaboration is that, from time to time, there are opportunities that should never be missed; I am very happy to collaborate and eventually become a co-author with great colleagues: Daniel Nüst (University of Münster), Barbara Hofer (University of Salzburg), Markus Konkol (University of Münster), Frank O Ostermann (University of Twente), Rusne Sileryte (Delft University of Technology), and Valentina Cerutti (University of Twente).

The paper is open access and the abstract is:

The demand for reproducible research is on the rise in disciplines concerned with data analysis and computational methods. Therefore, we reviewed current recommendations for reproducible research and translated them into criteria for assessing the reproducibility of articles in the field of geographic information science (GIScience). Using this criteria, we assessed a sample of GIScience studies from the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe (AGILE) conference series, and we collected feedback about the assessment from the study authors. Results from the author feedback indicate that although authors support the concept of performing reproducible research, the incentives for doing this in practice are too small. Therefore, we propose concrete actions for individual researchers and the GIScience conference series to improve transparency and reproducibility. For example, to support researchers in producing reproducible work, the GIScience conference series could offer awards and paper badges, provide author guidelines for computational research, and publish articles in Open Access formats.

Full citation is:

Nüst D, Granell C, Hofer B, Konkol M, Ostermann FO, Sileryte R, Cerutti V. (2018) Reproducible research and GIScience: an evaluation using AGILE conference papers. PeerJ 6:e5072, https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.5072