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MRC Biostatistics Unit

Photo of BSU staff member sat in front of computer carrying out data analysis

Making BSU science open and accessible is a core to the Unit's strategy. We support the FAIR principles: all our science should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reproducible. 

For example, this includes: 

  • 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.

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.