TREASURE: Changing Research Practice by Rewarding Graduate Students for Reproducible, Reusable and Open Research

Poster presented at the CoARA Conference 2026 about the institutional TREASURE training and certification interdisciplinary program offered to all master’s and PhD candidates at the University of Coimbra. The course is one of the outputs resulting from the institutional pilot project TREASURE, funded by CoARA Boost (CF1-2024), primarily targeting early-stage researchers (ESRs) as the future generation of qualified researchers.

About:

Recognizing and rewarding quality and impact of diverse research practices and outputs beyond scientific articles (e.g., preregistration, open methods, FAIR data, open code, citizen science) is crucial to promote rigor in research conduct, enhance reproducibility of findings, and potentiate knowledge advancement through reusability of outputs. Training on a new set of skills aligned with reproducible, reusable and open research is necessary, but incentives are key to fully adopting new practices. After several reform research assessment recommendations, the primary challenge is no longer defining reform principles but to move towards their implementation so that this can be tested.

The TREASURE program(*) is an implemented intervention to (1) train participants on diverse research practices aligned with reproducible, reusable, and open research (RROR), while (2) offering an additional reward for implementing RROR practices and outputs in their thesis research alongside their degree.

In this poster:

• we offer lessons learned and early results from the first Master’s candidates, who completed the TREASURE program’s 1st edition.
• we share created resources that can be reused by other institutions: a list of 16 diverse RROR practices and outputs, a manual to guide students in selecting and implementing practices, and an implementation guide for institutions interested in implementing similar programs.