Announcing NISO’s Draft Recommended Practice for Reproducibility Badging and Definitions

May 5, 2020: The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) is seeking comments from the information community on the draft recommended practice, Reproducibility Badging and Definitions. Following on the landmark U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) report, Reproducibility in Science, this Recommended Practice, developed by the NISO Taxonomy, Definitions, and Recognition Badging Scheme Working Group, provides a set of recognition standards to be universally deployed across the scholarly publishing output.  Comments will be accepted through June 18, 2020.

Reproducibility — the validation of research through sharing of the data and methods used — is an increasingly important topic in scholarly and scientific research, with both funding agencies and publishers increasingly encouraging, supporting, and even requiring the reproducibility of research results. As these reproducibility practices start to be more widely implemented, recognition and reward schemes and their related taxonomies are developing on an ad hoc basis. This has created a need for standardization, to avoid proliferation and conflicts of multiple badges and badge definitions in the scholarly community.  This draft Recommended Practice proposes common recognition practices, vocabulary, and iconography to be used to reward the sharing of data and methods. 

Working Group Co-Chairs, Lorena Barba of George Washington University, Wayne Graves of ACM, and Gerry Grenier of IEEE, commented: “In the spirit of the NASEM effort, we hope this NISO Recommended Practice will promote common recognition practices, vocabulary, and iconography to further facilitate sharing of data and methods. We and our colleagues on the Working Group are confident that, by adopting these recommendations, our community will be better able to consistently apply a set of reproducibility definitions and badges in the publishing process, which may also be used as a currency in the academic rewards culture. We look forward to reviewing feedback from the wider information community to aid in finalizing this Recommended Practice.”

“The Taxonomy, Definitions, and Recognition Badging Scheme Working Group has built on several siloed reproducibility badging efforts in different scholarly communities. Its aim is to avoid proliferation and conflicts of multiple badges and badge definitions in the scholarly community regarding reproducibility,” says Nettie Lagace, NISO Associate Executive Director. “We welcome feedback from all those with an interest in increasing transparency around the reproducibility of scholarly research results — librarians, publishers, service providers, funding agencies, and of course researchers themselves.”

The draft document can be found on the Taxonomy, Definitions, and Recognition Badging Scheme Working Group page of the NISO website.

About NISO

NISO, based in Baltimore, Maryland, fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website (https://niso.org).