Open Materials

Open Materials means making research materials (stimuli, procedures, instruments, code, instructions, tests) freely available on the public internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyse, re-process, pass them to software or use them for any other purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

Some fundamental points, which need to be considered when sharing data and code also apply to materials like protocols, stimuli, etc.

 FILE NAMING 

File names should be informative and useful for both humans and machines. The more meaningful the name the easier it will be for others to understand what the file contains and how it should be used.

Choose machine readable names

• Use deliberate deliminators: e.g. using “_” and “-” to deliminate units of metadata in the file names; don’t use spaces, punctuation, capital letters or special characters

Choose human readable names

• Choose names that explain the content; choose short names

Choose names that use default ordering (when not using version control)

• Number or date the versions so they can be ordered
• Put something numeric first (e.g. date or version number)
• Use YYYY-MM-DD for dates

ORGANIZING FILES

Be consistent throughout the research process

• Create a project directory and give it an informative name. Create and name subdirectories (components) with informative names and locations.
• Use one directory for one project.

HELPFUL TOOLS

Reagents

A reagents is a substance, compound or mixture that can be added to a system in order to create a chemical or other reaction. Reagents can be deposited with repositories like Addgene or ATCC to make them easily accessible to other researchers. License your materials so they can be reused by other researchers.

Protocols
A protocol describes a formal or official record of scientific experimental observations in a structured format. Deposit virtual protocols for citation, adaptation, and reuse using Protocols.io.  

Notebooks, containers, software, and hardware
Share notebooks with Open services such as mybinder that allow for public viewing and execution of the entire notebook on shared resources. Containers and notebooks can be shared with Rocker, Code Ocean or RStudio Cloud.

A Quick Guide to Software Licensing for the Scientist-Programmer can be found here.

Read Details 

BADGES TO ACKNOWLEDGE OPEN PRACTICES

The Open Materials badge is earned by making publicly available the components of the research methodology needed to reproduce the reported procedure and analysis.

Criteria

1. Digitally-shareable materials are publicly available on an open-access repository. The materials must have a persistent identifier and be provided in a format that is time-stamped, immutable, and permanent (e.g., university repository, a registration on the Open Science Framework, or an independent repository at www.re3data.org).
2. Infrastructure, equipment, biological materials, or other components that cannot be shared digitally are described in sufficient detail for an independent researcher to understand how to reproduce the procedure.
3. Sufficient explanation for an independent researcher to understand how the materials relate to the reported methodology.

The section on licensing might also be relevant in the context of Open Materials.