RDS provides specialized consulting services to campus affiliates covering various areas. Our team can assist researchers in crafting FAIR-compliant data management plans and facilitating their implementation. We can also help you and your research team get started with data organization, data wrangling, and the use of analysis tools for qualitative and quantitative data. We can assist with data documentation, provide guidance on licensing and ethical data sharing, and help you navigate data publication and archiving options.
Extended Engagements
RDS also offers extended engagements, combining group workshops and personalized coaching sessions for faculty and their team on the following topics.
Designing a Reproducible and Collaborative Research Lab
The “Designing a Reproducible and Collaborative Research Lab” (RCL) is a 9-month program, combining dynamic group workshops with personalized coaching to transform how your Faculty and Team approach research.
During this program, the Research Data Services (RDS) team partners with faculty and their lab members to set up the necessary infrastructure and practices for enhancing the reproducibility and reusability of their research. A key focus of this program is also to cultivate collaboration both within and across lab projects. This is achieved by meeting team members at their current stage in their reproducibility efforts and delivering customized solutions tailored to their specific needs. This benefits the researchers themselves, their teammates, and the wider community.
Topics
- Managing your lab data more efficiently
- Collaborative coding as a lab
- Automating your analytical workflows from raw data to scientific outputs
- Documenting & preserving things to make them reusable
Lab Outcomes
- More reproducible management of your lab’s scientific products (data, code, and more!)
- Better analytical strategies for collaboration
- Safety nets for your research lab content
- More efficient reuse of your work
- Streamlined on- and off- boarding of collaborators
Learning Opportunities for Lab Members
- Leverage GitHub to manage and collaborate on your lab’s code
- Develop strategies to centralize and manage your lab data
- Protect your lab’s scientific products against loss through backup and computing resources strategies
- Develop guidelines and templates on how to document your Lab research products and improve their reusability
- Adopt "good enough" research computing strategies for robust and more reusable code development & data management
Testimony
“Participating in this program has been absolutely invaluable for my team. We all learned so much, from using GitHub for lab coding projects to best practices for naming files, to how to create an ‘asset library’ for all of the video data we collect that will be future-proof and useful for numerous unforeseen projects into the future.”
-- Dr.Eleanor Caves, former participant
Caves Lab doctoral student Bryce Barbee and research technician Miya Ball observe the behavior of cleaner shrimp on a typical video brought back from their field site in Curaçao. Source: The Current
Resources
Reproducible & Collaborative Lab self-paced learning materials: https://ucsb-library-research-data-services.github.io/reproducible-lab/
UCSB The Current article on the program: https://news.ucsb.edu/in-focus/librarys-new-consultation-service-targets-campus-research-labs
Philosophy behind the program:
Enabling data‐driven collaborative and reproducible environmental synthesis science
J Brun, J., Lyon, N. J., Chen, A., Slette, I., De La Rosa, G., Caselle, J. E., Davis, F. W., & Downs, M. R. (2025). Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 16, 1061–1074. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.700362041210x