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Toolmaker

The Toolmaker IG worked together on several occasions to discuss joint interests:

5th METHODS Toolmaker Workshop on March 28th 2022

Impulse Lectures and Discussion focus

  • State of the METHODS grant-proposal (Claudia Biniossek)
  • State of things: What was planned in the proposal?  General overview and measures in the “Toolmakers” task area (Dominik Leiner)
  • Overview and general remarks (Urs Fischbacher)
  • Psych DS – a possible standard (Jon Peirce)

Discussion topics:

  • A common standard that fits tools throughout many disciplines.
  • Within-tool portability of designs and data.
  • Specification of elements to allow for replication.
  • Outreach to scientists to use the new opportunities.
  • Topics of the follow up meeting in June 2022

The next follow-up meeting is planned for June 2022.

4th METHODS Toolmaker Meeting on September 28th 2021 

Discussion focus

  • METHODS Grant proposal submission 2nd of November

The toolmaker IG is a powerful alliance of toolmakers, representing highly influential software (tools) in their respective research communities. This alliance grants METHODS a strong lever in multiple disciplines to promote common standards that allow for integration of different tools with one another and with data archiving solutions.

The software tools developed by individual members of the toolmaker interest group include a broad variety of methods and disciplines. To form a critical mass to define the future standards on an international level, the toolmakers of the following tools have the status of official METHODS participants:

  • classEx, classEx@school, and Lioness (Marcus Giamattei)
  • lab.js (Felix Henninger)
  • ORSEE (Ben Greiner)
  • OSF (Brian Nosek and Nicole Pfeiffer)
  • oTree (Martin Schonger)
  • PsychoPy and Pavlovia (Jonathan Peirce)
  • SoSci Survey, and the SoSci Panel (Dominik Leiner)
  • z-Tree (Urs Fischbacher)

These tools are already available to the broad scientific community and are widely used both within Germany and globally.

Why do we need such a group? There is little doubt about the strengths of the FAIR Data Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), and scientific associations have called on researchers to follow some or all of the FAIR principles regarding their research data.

Still, all previous approaches (most of them top-down) to make the majority of scientific data FAIR compliant have failed. Reasons are that (a) the majority of projects are not funded by organizations enforcing RDM strategies, (b) the effort of RDM often exceeds the return especially for small projects, and (c) habits change slowly, and researchers are not exempt from this rule. The vast majority of medium-sized and small research projects neither share the final data sets nor raw data. METHODS resolves this shortcoming by integrating RDM with the tools that researchers actually use, including but not limited to the tools already represented in the METHODS consortium. Therefore, METHODS strongly respects the heterogeneous purposes for sharing and (re-)using data from a user perspective.

3rd METHODS Toolmaker Discussion Meeting on May 27th 2021 

Discussion focus

  • How to translate the idea of a common interface into practice? 
  • Which (technical) criteria should we have for sockets and plugs 
  • Which further points have to be thought of (metadata, licenses)?
  • Which points could be significant for a toolmaker-position paper?

2nd METHODS Toolmaker Workshop on May 18th 2021

Discussion focus

  • “How can the tools work together?”
  • Technical cooperation between different tools by means of interfaces.
  • Level of rules and standards

1st METHODS Meeting on April 8th 2021

https://osf.io/v6ch5/

We will inform you about the METHODS consortium, aim to discuss the state of the toolmaker community within the METHODS consortium, and prepare the main points of the NFDI METHODS toolmaker workshop in May.

Schedule

  • 14.00 CET Core Principles of METHODS (Claudia Biniossek, Thomas Lauer & Dirk Betz)
  • 14.10 CET The Toolmakers
    • z-Tree (Urs Fischbacher, University of Konstanz)
    • oTree (Martin Schonger, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts)
    • z-Tree unleashed (Thomas Lauer, University of Erfurt)
    • Pavlovia, PsychoPy (Jon Peirce, University of Nottingham; Open Science Tools Ltd.)
    • lab.js (Felix Henninger, MZES, University of Mannheim)
    • SoSciSurvey: Research Data Management from a Tool’s Perspective (Dominike Leiner, LMU Munich)
    • Tools at the LEx Laboratory (Ivo Windrich & Roger Berger, Leipzig University)
    • Transdisciplinary Physics & NFDI4Phys (Hans-Günther Döbereiner, Biophysik, University of Bremen)
    • General file structures: Connecting data model and file format (Frank Tristram, KIT)
    • CaosDB (Alexander Schlemmer, MPI for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen)
  • 15.20 CET Integration (Workflows)
    • Open Science Framework OSF (Eric Olson, Center for Open Science)
    • YARD (Limor Peer, ISPS Yale)
    • CentraXX, CentraXX Med (Dennis Asante and Martin Zünkeler, KAIROS)
    • Galaxy (Björn Grüning, University of Freiburg)
    • Data Practice Paradoxes and Ways Out (Peter Wittenburg, Senior Advisor Max Planck Computing and Data Facility, Senior Advisor GWDG)
  • 16.00 CET Discussion (possible topics)
  • 16.25 CET Wrap up and Good Bye

All slides are available on OSF.