ENCORE development. Become involved!

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👋 Welcome to ENCORE

ENCORE is an approach to improve transparency and reproducibility of computational projects. ENCORE is an evolving project and we aim to further develop this approach by involving other groups and disciplines.

The General Discussion indicates several avenues for further development that are currently under discussion.

Importantly, further developments should be considered in the context of the 8 main requirements that were defined for ENCORE:

1. Consist of a single self-contained project compendium. The computational project should be organized and available as a self-contained and integrated compendium of data, code, results, and (conceptual) documentation, stored at a single location. It should also be easily transferable to other researchers or reviewers without breaking its internal consistency.

2. Facilitate transparency and documentation. ENCORE should facilitate transparency and a deep understanding (e.g., addressing why specific methods were selected and how these were applied) of the project through its standardized structure and documentation of concepts, methodology, data, code, and results.

3. Enable reproducibility. The project compendium should enable an (independent) peer to autonomously execute and understand the computational techniques and recreate the (published) outcomes.

4. Adhere to proposed guidelines. ENCORE should follow published guidelines for computational reproducibility as much as possible

5. Enable version control. ENCORE should allow version control of code and code documentation.

6. Facilitate harmonization. The ENCORE approach itself should be standardized and well-documented such that it can easily be adopted by any researcher. This allows harmonization within research groups, enabling further joint development of best practices within the ENCORE framework. Moreover, harmonization also facilitates checking transparency and reproducibility prior to publication by direct colleagues.

7. Provide a generic approach. ENCORE should be agnostic to the type of computational project (e.g., statistical analysis, mathematical modelling), data, programming language, and ICT infrastructure (e.g., operating system and computer hardware). ENCORE should make use of a software versioning system but otherwise should not rely on tools for project management, data processing, etc.

8. Allow adaptation to different styles of working. ENCORE should leave sufficient flexibility to accommodate different styles of working. The underlying sFSS should be accessible from any software tool the researcher might be using.

Further considerations in the context of these requirements are found in the ENCORE wiki: https://github.com/EDS-Bioinformatics-Laboratory/ENCORE/wiki/Complementary-Tools