GhentCORR: Building a peer community for Open and Reproducible Research at Ghent University

This poster showcases the efforts of the Ghent University Open Science Team in supporting researchers in the creation of a bottom-up community for Open and Reproducible Research: GhentCORR. While policies, incentives, infrastructure, and skills are essential for advancing Open Science, we believe that peer-to-peer communities are crucial to driving cultural change from within, making Open Science normative.

To achieve this, we participated in the Incubator programme of the International Network of Open Science & Scholarship Communities (INOSC), which provided a foundation for community building. We joined forces with a group of enthusiastic researchers that had initiated a local node of the Belgian Reproducibility Network, aligning our goals and combining resources. Together, we organized a community blueprint workshop where participants brainstormed and voted on the community’s identity and outlined key steps for its development.

A core team of researchers and support staff was established to meet regularly and continue working on the community’s growth. Based on the priorities identified in the blueprint workshop, we have:

• Established communication channels to facilitate internal and external engagement: an online community platform and the GhentCORR website
• Expanded the community’s base
• Launched a landscape survey to understand the adoption of open and reproducible practices at Ghent University
• Planned a major launch event to bring visibility to the community

This poster demonstrates how collaboration between researchers and support staff can help cultivate a peer-driven community that promotes cultural change towards Open and Reproducible Research.