Fellow Feature: Eduard Klapwijk
Every year, the Netherlands eScience Center shares a call for applications for our Fellowship Programme. The Programme is aimed at members of the academic research community who are passionate about acting as ambassadors for the use of research software. It is for individuals who have the ambition to promote or improve the use of research software within their organization or discipline. Our 2024-2025 fellows are currently halfway through their fellowship yeaEvery year, the Netherlands eScience Center shares a call for applications for our Fellowship Programme. The Programme is aimed at members of the academic research community who are passionate about acting as ambassadors for the use of research software. It is for individuals who have the ambition to promote or improve the use of research software within their organization or discipline. Our 2024-2025 fellows are currently halfway through their fellowship year. What better time to showcase their progress over the course of their programme.
We will present you with interviews with each of the Fellows. From creating tutorials to organizing interactive seminars, our Fellows are at the forefront of shaping the landscape of research software practices.
Keep reading to learn more about the progress of the project, ‘Implementing institutional reproducibility checks to promote good computational practices ’ led by Edward Klapwijk, a data steward at Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
What is the goal of your project?
To establish a workflow in which researchers can submit their data and code to a dedicated person or team in their faculty who will perform a reproducibility check for data and code before a result gets published.
What role does research software play in your daily activities?
As a research data steward, I provide advice to researchers on how to make their data and research materials available. If researchers do this, others can verify, reproduce, and build upon their research results. A vital part of this is sharing computer code, software or syntaxes to reproduce data cleaning and data analysis! As a researcher, I have also worked on developing research software (most recently the neuroUp R package).
What initially inspired you to apply to the Fellowship Programme at the eScience Center?
I had seen some very nice projects resulting from the program (for example from Daniela Gawehns and Pedro Hernandez-Serrano). Also, I always enjoy meeting colleagues who deeply care about reproducibility, open science and research software. I know people at the eScience Center care about these things, and I had a specific topic in mind for which the expertise of the Center would be highly valuable.
How is your Fellowship helping you promote the use of research software in your own community?
My project is focused on “good enough” software practices, and encouragement to share software code publicly in the social and behavioural sciences. Improving these practices is much needed to improve reproducibility in our community. I started with the wish to implement a service for reproducibility checks at my institute but spent the most time developing and organizing workshops to educate about reusable and reproducible code. Attendees really enjoyed the workshops and managed to learn new skills!
What have you enjoyed, thus far, during your Fellowship at the eScience Center?
Getting together with other fellows and sharing ideas and experiences was great! I also enjoyed collaborating with my mentor from the eScience Center, Sven van den Burg. We managed to develop and teach a great new workshop, based on existing materials (see the Reproducible research through reusable code workshop materials).
What do you hope will change in the use of research software in your community after your Fellowship?
I hope researchers will feel more confident to share their analysis code and scripts. These materials are a vital part of the research process! I hope at some point citing software scripts underlying research results will be as normal as citing literature references in publications.
Even better, if the level of reproducibility of those scripts is checked by others (for example using the CODECHECK workflow), this will ensure a basic quality level of your results being computationally reproducible.
What would you say to people who are interested in applying for future Fellowship Programmes?
Go for it! It helped me to dedicate time to a topic I deeply care about with great support from the eScience Center. The Fellowship also helped in making this part of my work visible: my colleagues and management are regularly asking how it is going with my fellowship project. This leads to more recognition for and conversations about research software then when it was just one of my own projects without the eScience Fellowship ‘seal of approval’.
Who are we?
The eScience Center is a research organization dedicated to applying research software to answer research questions in any scientific domain through project collaborations. It has the largest concentration of dedicated, high-level research software expertise in the Netherlands. The eScience Center also has a fellowship programme and makes all of its software and training materials openly available online. For more information about what we offer, visit esciencecenter.nl.