ReprohackNL 2019: Enhancing research reproducibility at Dutch Universities

University Libraries around the world play a crucial role in Open Science, contributing to more transparent, reproducible and reusable research. The Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) at Leiden University (LU) is a scholarly lab located in the LU Library. The CDS employes two complementary strategies to improve open data literacy among Leiden's scholars: existing top-down structures are used to provide Open Science training and services, while bottom-up initiatives are actively supported by offering CDS's expertise and facilities. A prime example of how bottom-up initiatives can blossom with the help of the CDS is the ReproHack initiative. ReproHack – a reproducibility hackathon – is a grass-root initiative by young scholars with the goal of improving research reproducibility in three ways: First, hackathon attendees learn about reproducibility tools and challenges by reproducing published results and providing feedback to authors on their attempt. Second, authors can nominate their own work and receive feedback on their reproducibility efforts. Third, the collaborative atmosphere at the event helps building an interdisciplinary community among researchers, who often lack such support in their own departments. A first ReproHack in the Netherlands took place on November 30th, 2019, co-organised by the CSD at the LU Library with 44 participants from the fields of psychology, engineering, biomedicine, and computer science, 3 had submitted their own work to the hackathon. From 19 papers with code and data, 24 feedback forms were filled, 5 papers were successfully reproduced and 6 where almost reproduced. Two speakers framed the event, the first one introducing participants to current developments on tools for reproducible research and the second one putting reproducibility into a broader context. The organizers aim to create resources to make the event format itself reproducible. ReproHack provides an opportunity for libraries to actively draw attention to and improve the reproducibility of science.