Background: The presenter will discuss their librarian role in a team-developed credit course on rigor, reproducibility, and transparency. Rigor and reproducibility is emphasized by the NIH. Recently, that emphasis has included a scorable requirement to address formal instruction in rigorous experimental design and transparency to enhance reproducibility. This requirement applies to institutional training and career development grants, among other NIH grant types. The requirement affects campus’ success in getting these institution-level T and K grants. Therefore, a team led by our School of Medicine formed to pilot a course for doctoral students on transparency, rigor, and reproducibility.
Description: The course was designed for medical and health sciences doctoral students, particularly MD/PhD students. The design team included faculty in medicine, pharmacy, and biostatistics, the research integrity officer, and the research data librarian. As a team, we developed learning outcomes. Then we divided up the content into modules. We used a hybrid synchronous-asynchronous design, with activities to do before classes followed by synchronous discussions. The librarian focused on modules on data recording and analysis, and data reporting and transparency. Evaluations averaged above-neutral on the rating: “I am better able to list basic strategies to increase the openness and reproducibility for the products of research.” Student answers in activities showed a modest increased understanding of reproducibility requirements in their field’s journals, and an appreciation of ways to improve results reporting to ensure reproducible science.
Conclusion: The pilot course was a positive experience for students, and a valuable partnership across departments. The course met goals of increasing awareness, but will be revised next year to balance robustness against time management. PIs of institutional training grants appreciated having a formalized way to address reproducibility requirements. It was particularly useful in addressing reproducibility and transparent reporting issues that are not always addressed in methods classes. Finally, this gave the librarian an opportunity to work as an equal co-instructor and build connections with a variety of faculty and professionals. The course demonstrated the role of library expertise in supporting the research lifecycle and essential skills for reproducibility and transparency in research.