Archive | 2021
WORCS: A workflow for open reproducible code in science
Abstract
Adopting open science principles can be challenging, requiring conceptual education and training in the use of new tools. This paper introduces the Workflow for Open Reproducible Code in Science (WORCS): A step-by-step procedure *Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]. **All authors of this paper, except the first, are listed in alphabetical order. Author contributions are detailed in the document ’authors.csv’ on the project repository, at https://github.com/cjvanlissa/worcs. 2451-8484 © 2021 – The authors. Published by IOS Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0). 30 C.J. Van Lissa et al. / Workflow for open science that researchers can follow to make a research project open and reproducible. This workflow intends to lower the threshold for adoption of open science principles. It is based on established best practices, and can be used either in parallel to, or in absence of, top-down requirements by journals, institutions, and funding bodies. To facilitate widespread adoption, the WORCS principles have been implemented in the R package worcs, which offers an RStudio project template and utility functions for specific workflow steps. This paper introduces the conceptual workflow, discusses how it meets different standards for open science, and addresses the functionality provided by the R implementation, worcs. This paper is primarily targeted towards scholars conducting research projects in R, conducting research that involves academic prose, analysis code, and tabular data. However, the workflow is flexible enough to accommodate other scenarios, and offers a starting point for customized solutions. The source code for the R package and manuscript, and a list of examples of WORCS projects, are available at https://github. com/cjvanlissa/worcs.