Journal Article

Building a local community of practice in scientific programming for life scientists

Mozilla, Kuzak, Mateusz, Moser, Aurelia, Martinez, Carlos, Bleeker, Petra, Galland, Marc, Stevens, Sarah, L R

2018

Overview

In this paper, we describe why and how to build a local community of practice in scientific programming for life scientists who use computers and programming in their research. A community of practice is a small group of scientists who meet regularly to help each other and promote good practices in scientific programming. While most life scientists are well trained in the laboratory to conduct experiments, good practices with (big) data sets and their analysis are often missing. We propose a model on how to build such a community of practice at a local academic institution, present two real-life examples, and introduce challenges and implemented solutions. We believe that the current data deluge that life scientists face can benefit from the implementation of these small communities. Good practices spread among experimental scientists will foster open, transparent, and sound scientific results beneficial to society. Good practices in scientific programming are needed to increase research reproducibility Modern biology is facing reproducibility issues [12]. While evidence suggests that this might not be as bad as it sounds [13], there is clearly a need for increased reproducibility. For

• Publisher: CCSD,Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Big Data / Biology and Life Sciences / Community Participation - methods / Data Analysis / Data Science - methods / Ecology and Environmental Sciences / Education, Professional / Humans / Life Sciences / Models, Theoretical / People and Places / Research and Analysis Methods / Research Design - standards / Science Policy / Social Sciences