In the digital age, data is the lifeblood of research and discovery. Too much research remains hidden behind paywalls. As the research community calls for transparency and reproducibility, the value of the raw data supporting published research is recognized not just for peer-review, but as an asset for innovation. This shift calls for an evaluation of how data is shared, cited, and preserved in the evolving scholarly communication landscape.
While research is an international endeavour, it is not free from politics. In the current global political climate, time is of the essence for preserving access to invaluable research data. One only needs to look south of the border, and at current headlines on data deletion, to fully grasp that an open science model offers resilience during periods of political instability.
Open science grounded in transparency, collaboration, and accessibility relies on the ability of researchers to replicate findings, verify results, and build upon each other's work. In the rapidly evolving landscape of academic and scientific discovery, reproducibility stands as a cornerstone. As enduring institutions, academic libraries are the ideal long-term custodians of data sets and champions of reproducibility.
What is scientific reproducibility?
Researchers often deal with the balancing act of organizing their analyses, learning new computational tools, and meticulously documenting their data and methodologies as they focus on making their findings reproducible.
Building on their participation in the 2023-24 Ithaka S+R-led project "Building Campus Strategies for Data Support Services," UVic librarians and research computing specialists saw the need to provide more educational programming and community building for data skills and open science. Born from this insight came the six-part workshop series Reproducibility for All (RfA) that involved participants in hands-on learning with topics from handling missing data to preserving research software to research lifecycle issues.
"Reproducibility is essential for verifying research findings, allowing others to build on existing work, and fostering transparency and trust in scholarship," says Science and Research Data Literacy Librarian Monique Grenier. "It's a fundamental practice that supports the broader goals of open science."
UVic professor David Castle of the School of Public Administration concurs that a research process that is not replicable is not scientific, whether observational or experimental, and says that being unable to replicate research results raises concerns that the findings are found to be in error, and in the worst-case scenario, suggesting fraud or fabrication. From his perspective, primarily, open science is a "commitment to make science accessible and, second, transparent about how that science is used."
Humanities professor Janelle Jenstad, who participated in a RfA panel discussion, also applies reproducibility principles in her research. "We don't use the term reproducibility in the Humanities, but the principle is important," says Jenstad. "Research findings must hold true when another person looks at the evidence or at comparable evidence. For example, if I claim that John Stow's 1598 Survey of London demonstrates a proto-ecological understanding of riverine ecosystems, I'll cite selected evidence; anyone following in my footsteps will see my argument borne out even in the evidence I didn't cite, if my argument is reproducible."
Successes and Challenges
In 2024, the University of Victoria Dataverse was certified as a Trustworthy Data Repository by the CoreTrustSeal Standards and Certification Board an international non-governmental organization promoting sustainable and trustworthy data infrastructures.
UVic Libraries is the first Canadian academic library to achieve the certification. For data users, it means they can trust that the data in the repository will follow best practices in data curation, thereby enhancing their quality and usability.
"[First], this matters tremendously from the standpoint of having UVic's Dataverse meet important principles FAIR, CARE, and TRUST and many other criteria," says Castle, who is also chair of the scientific committee of the World Data System, a global network of research data centres and services whose mission is to enhance the capabilities, impact and sustainability of member data repositories and data services. "Second, UVic's Dataverse is part of Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository. This matters because Borealis is a bilingual, multidisciplinary research data repository supported by academic libraries and research institutions across Canada."
"Datasets and scholarly papers need to be backed up in multiple places, downloaded to our personal devices, and deposited in multiple countries," says Jenstad. "We need robust restore points from which we can launch new knowledge portals after repressive regimes are toppled. But Jenstad also sees a few challenges, including the time-consuming process to allow anyone to see how she collected and treated the data in her texts, and the threat of AI. "After decades of working to make resources and data open, we're now seeing commercial AI companies crawling our sites, ingesting the information, and then giving it (without attribution and sometimes twisted) to users," explains Jenstad. "I am deeply troubled by the possibility that open science might have to be locked down to protect it from bad-faith AI crawlers."
Real-world benefits and UVic involvement
According to Grenier, there are many benefits to having an increased output of reproducible research that include advancing research excellence, increased transparency and trust in academic institutions, and mobilizing knowledge. And with so much at stake, and online with global political instability, there has never been a greater need than now to work together across disciplines and institutions.
"Universities are key players. They can promote open science by developing supportive policies, providing necessary infrastructure, fostering a collaborative culture, and backing initiatives like open science communities," says Grenier. "UVic Libraries supports these initiatives through collaborations like the Reproducibility for All series and the establishment of the Open Science Community of Victoria (OSCV)."
At Castle's February 2025 RfA presentation, he emphasized his endorsement of the concept of "open" but with limitations. "In practice, data is expensive to generate, curate, store, share, and keep secure. There should not be unfettered access to all data for reasons of commercial confidentiality or sensitivity of the data," he states. "Abiding by the FAIR principles provides a framework for making data findable and accessible, but it's not open season' so to speak."
Grenier provides the example of a published dataset by UVic authors of fish sounds that were downloaded over 43,000 times from UVic Dataverse to better understand fish behaviour and the intersection with human impact on underwater sounds, serving as a public resource for citizen science and anyone interested in learning more about maintaining the health of oceans and waterways. In her opinion, reliance on academic service providers, like libraries, research services, and research computing, to build and maintain the infrastructure underpinning digital research are the best places to right the ship.
Jenstad's involvement with The Endings Project first initiated in 2016 with UVic librarians, humanities faculty members, and programmers from the Humanities Computing and Media Centre (HCMC) is another example of finding successful digital solutions to complex digital projects. Academic libraries and archives have always been responsible for ensuring that important research is preserved and maintained for the use of future scholars. Endings-compliant websites offer a first-in-Canada prototype for scalable, sustainable archiving of digital research projects.
"We were concerned about the troubling fact that 80 percent of digital scholarly projects were disappearing because of obsolete technologies, and painfully aware that libraries cannot take on and maintain boutique digital projects," says Jenstad. "We wanted to know how to build digital projects in such a way that they could be preserved easily by libraries, with their content and features intact, without the need to maintain a fragile software stack."
Jenstad emphasizes that if the open-access digital project disappears, then the associated knowledge with it cannot be reproduced. And so, the Endings team concluded that a static website was the solution so that digital products will outlive the software used to make it, demonstrating that open science is best utilized if people can access it.
By supporting open science at UVic and beyond, faculty and librarians have a goal to transform research culture, fostering a scholarly environment where transparency and open sharing of methods and data are not just ideals, but everyday practices and expectations.
However, the urgent present-day call for transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration cannot be stressed enough. "The accountability of elected and non-elected officials in their decision-making and use of evidence are among our most important democratic ideals," says Castle.
