Project TIER (Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research) aims to promote the integration of principles related to transparency and replicability in the research training of social scientists. The project's mission is to promote a systemic change in the professional norms related to the transparency and reproducibility of empirical research in the social sciences. It is guided by the principle that providing comprehensive replication documentation for research involving data analysis should be as ubiquitous and routine as providing a list of references.
Statistical Education Section members Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel and Ben Baumer were project fellows in 2015-2016 and Amelia McNamara is a project fellow in 2016-2017. As part of the fellowship Mine worked on getting Project TIER on GitHub by creating template repositories organized according to the TIER Protocol (https://github.com/ProjectTIER). She also taught a workshop titled "Making your research reproducible with Project TIER, R, and GitHub" to Economics graduate students at Duke University and a Computing Bootcamp for incoming graduate students to the PhD and MS in Statistical Science programs at Duke University. Ben led a similar workshop for economics graduate students at Clark University last April. Amelia has been exploring the use of DigitalOcean as an alternative to campus-hosted RStudio servers. She will also be leading a workshop at the ENAR International Biometric Society conference in March on "Data Science for Statisticians," including elements of reproducible research. All three continue integrating reproducible workflows into their introductory statistics and data sciences courses.
Additionally, Ben and Mine co-organized a session on Reproducibility in Statistics and Data Science at JSM 2016 that Amelia chaired. More information on the session, as well as slides from talks from the session, can be found at http://citizen-statistician.org/2016/08/03/jsm-2016-session-on-reproducibility-in-statistics-and-data-science/. The JSM session led to a webinar sponsored by the ASA-MAA Joint Committee, the Statistical Education Section, and the Statistical Learning and Data Science Section titled "Teaching Reproducible Research: Inspiring New Researchers to Do More Robust and Reliable Science." The webinar featured talks by Mine and Karl Broman of the University of Wisconsin, and was moderated by Ben. Recording of this webinar is at https://youtu.be/jAjlQnLEGN8.
Project TIER hosts workshops for faculty and graduate students. The next Faculty Development Workshop will be held in Haverford College on March 31-April 1, 2017. The target deadline for applications is March 1. Additionally, contingent upon funding, a call for applications for 2017-2018 Fellowships will be posted in early 2017. More information on the project and opportunities to get involved can be found at http://www.projecttier.org/.