A petition has been started by Michael Hansen (NIH, Bethesda, US) and others working on Open Source Software in the MR community to create an ISMRM Study Group on Reproducible Research. We talked to Michael and once the study group is formed Open Source Hardware will be included as well.  So please support this great initiative! Sign the petition here if you are a full voting member of the ISMRM or convince a voting member (e.g. postdocs in your lab or your boss) to sign. You can send the scanned form to Michael or us (info@opensourceimaging.org).

The impact of your research can be greatly increased if your work is reproducible (e.g. more citations), science can advance faster if the work of peer scientists is open source and technological development costs can be reduced for other researchers and for product developments saving a lot of resources.

Here is the message from Michael Hansen with more details on the goals of the study group:

“Several of the people involved in Open Source software in the MR community are proposing an ISMRM Study Group on Reproducible Research.
The goal of the Reproducible Research Study Group is to promote and enable the idea that scientific results, claims, and analyses can and should be published with their data and associated software code in a form that would allow others to reproduce the results and build upon them. To this end, the group aims to:
  1. Define and develop standards for data sharing
  2. Evaluate and promote platforms for data publishing and sharing
  3. Provide and evaluate curated collections of Open Source software:
    1. Image reconstruction software
    2. Simulation software
    3. Analysis tools
  4. Develop guidelines for reproducible research manuscripts in our field.
  5. Standard descriptions of data, software, pulse sequences and protocols
  6. Engage with MR system vendors to encourage adoption of open data standards and development environments

If you are an ISMRM member and you are willing to commit to joining such a study group, I would be grateful if you (and any members in your lab/group/community) would fill in and sign the attached petition form.

If you have questions/concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out.
Thanks,
Michael”