Good practices to enable sharing and reuse

Put yourself in the position of someone who is seeing your published outputs for the first time. What do they need to know about your work in order to make sense and make use of it? Here are some tips.

Include complete documentation

Include metadata and clear instructions. Empathy is key; put yourself in the shoes of someone who is completely unfamiliar with what you are sharing. For example, if you are publishing bird survey data, it might take the form of a big spreadsheet. Consider naming and documenting each column of your data table for an uninitiated reader to immediately understand. A column named “sp” might be clear to you as the name of the bird species, but naming it “species” would make it much more understandable. Another common issue are timestamps. For instance, if a date is recorded as “12-06-11”, there is no way for someone else to unambiguously tell what the year, month, and date are. What about the time “06:12”? Is it in the morning or evening? Which time zone? This illustrates the importance of including documentation with the data explaining as much detail as possible.

Data standards

It is also important to adopt data standards that tell you about how to best process and format data for publication. For example, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) has a guide to standards on publishing ecological data. Look for a similar standard for your scientific discipline, and apply it consistently from the beginning of your project.

Stylised text of FAIR principles by SangyaPundir, from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

However you publish your data, there is a well-established set of guidelines called FAIR data principles. FAIR stands for “findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability” and should apply to all data you publish. More resources on FAIR are in the Further information section.

While the examples above are related to data, the principles apply to other types of output, too.

Use open and editable file formats

Open science best practices remind us to consider the method and format for publishing material. A typical example in the digital age is the importance of choosing an appropriate file format.

In the case of the Snapshot Safari example discussed previously, their published teaching activity guides are saved as PDF files. PDF is good at maintaining the structure and look of a document, but is very difficult to edit. One improvement is to publish these guides using editable file types.

The software needed to open and edit files also makes a big difference. For instance, Microsoft Word is very popular for text-based documents, but this is a format that changes with every new version of the software. Word documents are less accessible, especially for people who can’t afford to use Microsoft Word or obtain a particular version; and because the file format is a proprietary secret, a Word document saved today will become increasingly difficult to read in the future. Fortunately, word processing software like Microsoft Word allows you to save documents in the Open Document Format which is far more accessible.

For archival purposes, it is even better to use a pure-text based file format. When it comes to tabular data, saving it as a comma-separated values (CSV) file is more sustainable than a proprietary spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel. For text-heavy documents, using Markdown is a relatively simple way to capture content and formatting.

Can you think of any other open formats?

Please see the Further information section for more suggestions.