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To develop your capstone project related to open research, it may be helpful to review the Open Research Unit Shared Reflections. The reflections were developed to explore the ways open research could be applied to the work of the POSE cohort. The reflections will provide examples of how to apply open research into practice and the steps needed to accomplish that application.
Sample Open Research Capstone Project
The following are examples of possible capstone projects for the Open Research unit. These examples may not apply to your specific experiences but are meant to provide an outline of what the capstone project should address when you are preparing to share. For more details and templates for the capstone project, review the Capstone Project Requirements part of this unit.
Capstone Example 1 – OSF
I am at the beginning of a reproducibility study with 4 other institutions and a total of 15 researchers. We will be engaging in researching and replicating over 20 psychology studies to produce the same results. This study will include gathering, synthesizing, and analyzing publications, comments, and data for each of the studies and will use a number of scholarly tools (e.g. Zotero, SPSS, etc.). To prepare for this study I will work with my project team to develop a plan for centralizing our project content and tools on OSF.
For my capstone project, I will attend some training in OSF and analyze our team’s workflows to identify how to organize our content in the OSF.
For my project I will:
- Attend an OSF workshop hosted by UBC Library
- Review the module Working in a Reproducible & Replicable Manner and perform a workflow analysis
- Gather all the elements, outputs, and tools we are using for our study
- Develop a structure for organizing the study’s content in OSF
- Create an OSF account and begin developing out the structure
Capstone Example 2 – Portage DMP Assistant & Preservation
With the Tri-Agency Statement of Principles on Digital Data Management, it is more important now than ever to really work through the details of a data management plan for my work, including collection, storage, metadata, and preservation. I haven’t taken the time to investigate all of the tools available to develop a structured and formalized plan. I also haven’t considered the importance of archiving my past data in a manner that is findable and preserved. This is my opportunity!
For my capstone project, I would like to investigate the DMP Assistant and the variety of preservation options available to me for the data I have already collected from past research.
- Create an account with the DMP Assistant
- Work through the DMP Assistant questions with my current research and export the finalized plan
- Book a consultation with UBC Library to discuss my data and ways to archive the content
- Begin the process of sharing my data based on the consultation suggestions
Capstone Example 3 – Organize Research Materials
I am currently engaging in research investigating the information behaviour of first-generation undergraduate students at a research-intensive university. The research involves recorded interviews and participatory arts-based elicitation methods requiring interviewees to draw maps of their information-gathering behaviours. This has yielded a great number of files in a variety of formats (e.g. .docx, xls., .jpg, .mp4, etc.)
For my capstone project, I will review my naming conventions and file organization for my current research project in hopes of developing better practices for this project but also in the long term for other projects.
For my project I will organize my research materials to support ease of sharing by doing the following:
- Developing naming conventions and file organization using the Best Practices for Organization module and additional guidelines from EarthLab
- Developing a README file using the Make a README Markdown Template and including the naming conventions and file organization