How does culture play a part?

Last updated on 2024-12-10 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 20 minutes

This may or may not be as relevant to your students - but it may lead to discussions at your own level, across research support staff or leadership staff.

Consider who is coming to your classes, and why. Has someone senior told everyone they need to go? That may be Top-down change, but do people feel prepared? Do they see or believe in the benefits?

Are your senior leaders looking to learn more about RR? This is a good time to suggest how they can get together and start prompting change.

Is it your researchers and research students? Change can happen at any level, and bottom up change is very real and can be quite powerful. It can consist of having groups of people meet informally and share ideas and strategies. It can be making personal changes, and gaining benefits that others may pay attention to. It can be through pushing for new systems that encourage RR.

In Australia, a big ground-up movement was hacky hours - a space somewhere between a help desk and a meetup where people who wanted to upskill in data science (especially after carpentry training) could meet. This led to Research Bazaar conferences for most states across the country, with each state having multiple universities sharing expertise and teachers.

When @amandamiotto was interviewing HASS researchers, especially in the space of interpretive findings around culture and filling gaps in history, one of the things that a few researchers agreed on is that RR doesn’t always make sense for some areas of research.

Quote from a researcher (shared with permission)

“With qualitative data in some areas, you do need rigour and a certain level of reproducibility, but it needs to be noted that at some stage reproducibility ends and it becomes about the inductive findings from the individual research context.”

Building a culture of Reproducible Research in your group

The benefits of implementing changes for reproducibility need to be clear, so that the people around you understand why they are spending energy and efforts to change.

Change can start….

With Ourselves

Some change can start with ourselves, and the fact you are here today is a perfect example of that.

As a Group

Change can come from a group leader or the people in the research group. Often, practical changes with clear outcomes and goals offer incremental improvements over time.

As a Organisation

Some change comes from the organisation. Change in organisations can come from two directions:

  • Top down - from your senior leaders team, they may have an interest building Reproducible Research into the Organisation’s Values and Goals. They may see the benefits Reproducible Research brings to business continuity, auditing and reputation.

  • Bottom up - researchers and research students may change the way they work and advocate for tools that enable them. They may see the direct benefits to citation, clarity in data storage or investment in automation.

This is a good time to highlight movement in your groups or organisations that encourage RR.

Consider your audience

Considering your audience when encouraging RR is incredibly important. Your senior executives will have vastly different motivations to your researchers on why they may benefit from RR. Your HDRs will again have another view.

Also consider, for each of those audiences, what is important to them? What are the risks to their work?

We’ll discuss this further down in this lesson.

Where are you now?

Consider the culture of the people you work directly with - collaborators, supervisors, students etc.

  • What values does your team have?

  • Is reproducibility currently a value?

  • How can this value become an action?

Actions can be in many forms. We’ve already talked about Standard Operating Procedures and how reproducibility can be built into procedures. This makes responsibilities clear on what part each person will play. Data Management Plans can set expectations early on how reproducibility is going to play a part in the project.

Another idea is to agree on a manifesto. You can use the following as a template:

“Reproducibility PI Manifesto”, L. A. Barba. (13 December 2012). https://10.6084/m9.figshare.104539 Presentation for a talk given at the ICERM workshop “Reproducibility in Computational and Experimental Mathematics”. Published on figshare under CC-BY.

Change Management

Change can be uncomfortable and at times, even scary. Instead of doing the known, you are trying the unknown…. and asking others to do the same.

Testimonial

#Behavior change is hard.

“Behavior change is hard. Whatever its faults, the status quo is familiar and the warts are known. The status quo is also easy to maintain. Just do nothing, inertia takes care of everything. We even have a tendency to defend the status quo. We’d rather believe that the way it is, is the way it should be.”

June 11th, 2019, Brian Nosek, https://www.cos.io/blog/strategy-for-culture-change

There are ways we can prepare people for change. Good change management practices are important. Consider the information and context people require to understand and make sense of the change.

  • What is happening?

  • Why is it happening?

  • How is this happening?

  • Who is doing this?

  • When is it happening?

There are steps we can do to make change less scary.

  • Offer information early and consistantly

  • Provide opportunities for training

  • Ensure “What does this mean for my work” is clear

The following toolkit for Change Management is a great place to start.

How to see a culture change from different viewpoints

Put each hat of different people affected by your changes.

Yourself Research Students Research Staff Research Leader Senior Leadership team
Goal - My aim is to do ….
Values - It is valuable spending my time on ….
Experiences- When attempting this, I found…

Or you could use this in a different way for individuals:

When it comes to knowledge trust…. When it comes to knowledge retention…. When it comes to being reproducible….
Goal - My aim is to do ….
Values - It is valuable spending my time on ….
Experiences- When attempting this, I found…

Useful Resources:

Strategy for Culture Change

Nosek, B. Strategy for culture change, Center for Open Science, web log post 11 June 2019, viewed 26 May 2021. Available from: https://www.cos.io/blog/strategy-for-change licenced as CC-BY

Culture Change- Research Data Management Frameworks

ARDC. (2023). Research data management framework for institutions (Version 2). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8433246 licenced as CC-BY

References

Jacqueline Monaghan, Siobhan M Brady, Elizabeth S Haswell, Sonali Roy, Benjamin Schwessinger, Heather E McFarlane, Running a research group in the next generation: combining sustainable and reproducible research with values-driven leadership, Journal of Experimental Botany, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1 January 2023, Pages 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb/erac407 licenced as Creative Commons CC-BY

Markowetz, F. Five selfish reasons to work reproducibly. Genome Biol 16, 274 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-015-0850-7 licenced as CC-BY 4.0

Nosek, B. Strategy for culture change, Center for Open Science, web log post 11 June 2019, viewed 26 May 2021. Available from: https:// www.cos.io/blog/strategy-for-change licenced as CC-BY 4.0

Government of South Australia (2020, July 6). Change Management Toolkit. Office of the Commissioner for Public Sector Employment. https://www.publicsector.sa.gov.au/about/Resources-and-Publications/innovation-lab/the-tools/change-management-toolkit licenced as CC-BY

Key Points

In this lesson, we have learnt:

  • Culture plays a big part, and can happen at many levels

  • Change can be scary for you and the people around you, but there are ways to help people through it