The Carpentries Incubator and Lab: a pathway to peer-reviewed publication for open source lessons

The Carpentries teaches software and data skills to researchers and librarians all over the world. Our Instructor Training program promotes good teaching practices, grounded in research findings in educational psychology. Certified Instructors teach lessons developed and maintained by the community in short-format workshops. These lessons are developed in open source repositories and published online with a permissive CC-BY license.

The Carpentries Incubator was created to provide a space for the community to collaborate on the development and testing of new lessons. The Incubator contains more than 100 lesson repositories, at various different stages of the lesson life cycle, teaching a wide range of skills relevant to RSEs, including workflow management, statistics and deep learning, and MRI data analysis. Community members collaborate to create new lessons, and teach and provide feedback on those that have reached later stages of maturity.

The Carpentries Lab provides a space for the community to perform open peer review of these lessons, curating a collection of accessible, high-quality community-developed lessons that Instructors can be confident are ready to adopt and teach to their audience. In collaboration with The Journal of Open Source Education (JOSE), the Lab provides a mechanism for peer review to result in journal publication credit for lesson developers.

This poster outlines the pathways a lesson can take through The Carpentries Incubator and Lab, the support provided for lesson development in The Carpentries, and details of the open peer review and publication process.