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Our path to better science in less time using open data science tools

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 1, Article number: 0160 (2017) Cite this article

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Abstract

Reproducibility has long been a tenet of science but has been challenging to achieve—we learned this the hard way when our old approaches proved inadequate to efficiently reproduce our own work. Here we describe how several free software tools have fundamentally upgraded our approach to collaborative research, making our entire workflow more transparent and streamlined. By describing specific tools and how we incrementally began using them for the Ocean Health Index project, we hope to encourage others in the scientific community to do the same—so we can all produce better science in less time.

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Figure 1: Better science in less time, illustrated by the Ocean Health Index project.

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Acknowledgements

The Ocean Health Index is a collaboration between Conservation International and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California at Santa Barbara. We thank J. Polsenberg, S. Katona, E. Pacheco and L. Mosher who are our partners at Conservation International. We thank all past contributors and funders that have supported the Ocean Health Index, including B. Wrigley and H. Wrigley and The Pacific Life Foundation. We also thank all the individuals and groups that openly make their data, tools and tutorials freely available to others. Finally, we thank H. Wickham, K. Ram, K. Woo and M. Schildhauer for friendly review of the developing manuscript. See http://ohi-science.org/betterscienceinlesstime as an example of a website built with RMarkdown and the RStudio–GitHub workflow, and for links and resources referenced in the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93101, California, USA

    Julia S. Stewart Lowndes, Courtney Scarborough, Jamie C. Afflerbach, Melanie R. Frazier, Casey C. O’Hara, Ning Jiang & Benjamin S. Halpern

  2. EcoQuants.com, Santa Barbara, 93103, California, USA

    Benjamin D. Best

  3. Bren School for Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, 93177, California, USA

    Benjamin S. Halpern

  4. Silwood Park Campus, Imperial College London, Ascot, SL5 7PY, UK

    Benjamin S. Halpern

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  1. Julia S. Stewart Lowndes
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  2. Benjamin D. Best
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  8. Benjamin S. Halpern
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Correspondence to Julia S. Stewart Lowndes.

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Lowndes, J., Best, B., Scarborough, C. et al. Our path to better science in less time using open data science tools. Nat Ecol Evol 1, 0160 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0160

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