Report on the First IEEE Workshop on the Future of Research Curation and Research Reproducibility

This report describes perspectives from the Workshop on the Future of Research Curation and Research Reproducibility that was collaboratively sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) in November 2016. The workshop brought together stakeholders including researchers, funders, and notably, leading science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) publishers. The overarching objective was a deep dive into new kinds of research products and how the costs of creation and curation of these products can be sustainably borne by the agencies, publishers, and researcher communities that were represented by workshop participants. The purpose of this document is to describe the ideas that participants exchanged on approaches to increasing the value of all research by encouraging the archiving of reusable data sets, curating reusable software, and encouraging broader dialogue within and across disciplinary boundaries. How should the review and publication processes change to promote reproducibility? What kinds of objects should the curatorial process expand to embrace? What infrastructure is required to preserve the necessary range of objects associated with an experiment? Who will undertake this work? And who will pay for it? These are the questions the workshop was convened to address in presentations, panels, small working groups, and general discussion.