Summary and Setup
Many librarians already provide direct, hands-on support to researchers, and funders, journals, and institutions increasingly expect that work to be reproducible, not just open. This lesson gives library and research-support staff a practical skill for that: given a research workflow, identify what someone would need to follow or check it, recommend a concrete improvement where that connection is missing, and explain who could carry out or assess the resulting check.
The lesson works through a single recurring case across concepts, benefits and challenges, tools, and library services, so the practice of connecting a claim to its evidence carries through rather than resetting each episode. It also aims to prompt further development of library support services in this area, drawing on expertise academic libraries already have.
Learning Objectives
After attending this training, participants will be able to:
- Distinguish reproduction, replication, and openness in a research scenario, and explain what evidence supports the distinction
- Given a research workflow, identify what connects a reported result to the materials and decisions that support it, and recommend a concrete improvement where that connection has a gap
- Given a researcher’s request, recommend a proportionate check and its limit, and identify who is positioned to carry it out - which may be the researcher’s own team, a skilled librarian, or a partner service, depending on expertise and access
Along the way, the lesson also covers the benefits and challenges of reproducible research, how reproducibility looks different across quantitative and qualitative methods, and a set of concrete tools mapped to each stage of a research workflow - these support the three outcomes above rather than standing as separate promises.
No software installation is needed for this lesson. You do not need any prior programming or statistics background - a web browser is all that’s required to participate.