Making our science open and accessible is a key element of the unit’s strategy. We support the FAIR principles: all our science should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reproducible. 

For example, this includes: 

• making all our publications open access 

• releasing free, open-source software to implement statistical methods

• releasing code to reproduce analyses in publications 

• sharing research data in an open and responsible manner (e.g. storing personal data securely)

Software

We routinely develop software to implement novel statistical methods, and make this software freely-available and open source. Highlights of these are described on our software page. This includes the BUGS software, and various widely-used R packages that are made available via CRAN.

We now also maintain a GitHub page for the BSU, which contains mirrors of the source code for packages that we currently maintain. This also contains code to reproduce analyses in published papers – another important part of open science.

An archive of older software and analysis code is provided on our historical software archive page.

Further Resources

The GitHub page was part of a broader strategic push led by our Knowledge Transfer Facilitator to improve the open practices of the unit. Many of the seminars he led have been condensed and made publicly available on figshare. These contain introductions to key parts of the open science stack like DOI providers and code hosting platforms.

Open Science Workshop

In October 2022, the Unit organised and hosted an Open Science Workshop with the aim of promoting idea-sharing, as well as networking between MRC Units and Institutes. Read more.