Barriers to reproducible research (and how to overcome them)

Abstract: This talk will discuss the perceived and actual barriers experienced by researchers attempting to do reproducible research in neuroscience, and give practical guidance on how they can be overcome. It will include suggestions on how to make your code and data available and usable for others (including a strong suggestion to document both clearly so you don't have to reply to lots of email questions from future users). However, as this is a Brainhack event, Dr Whitaker will push you further: to consider working openly. Open research is an important step in changing an academic reward system from its current focus on individual contributions and "getting there first" to sharing work as it is being created and allowing collaborators to contribute from the start. All Brainhack Warsaw participants will leave knowing there is something they can do to step towards making their research reproducible, and hopefully a few will be inspired to make more radical changes.

Bio: Kirstie Whitaker is a Research Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute (London, UK). She completed her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley in 2012 and holds a BSc in Physics from the University of Bristol and an MSc in Medical Physics from the University of British Columbia. She was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge from 2012 to 2017. Dr Whitaker uses magnetic resonance imaging to study child and adolescent brain development and is a passionate advocate for reproducible neuroscience. She is a Fulbright scholarship alumna and 2016/17 Mozilla Fellow for Science. Kirstie was named, with her collaborator Petra Vertes, as a 2016 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine.