University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
To improve the ability to curate and verify replication datasets within the Dataverse data archiving platform by integrating computational notebooks and software containerization with data curation workflows
This grant funds a project led by Jonathan Crabtree, Director of Cyberinfrastructure at the University of North Carolina’s Odum Institute, to improve and expand the capabilities of the Dataverse open source data repository platform. Odum is responsible for executing and implementing the Replication and Verification Policy for the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) and uses Dataverse as the underlying platform where authors who publish in AJPS can upload their data and software code to ensure results may be replicated. Because Dataverse was originally designed for data and not software, however, the process can be unwieldy and time consuming. Crabtree and his team plan to use the Jupyter computing platform and the open source software “containerization” toolkit Docker to create a “Confirmable Reproducible Research (CoRe2) environment” for Dataverse that would combine the ability to containerize computational research with communication and workflow tools. This would greatly speed and partially automate the process of verifying that submitted research results can be verified using the code and data uploaded. Grant funds will provide support for this project for three years. years.