Associate Professor Victoria Stodden has been invited to guest edit a special theme issue of the Harvard Data Science Review dedicated to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) report on Reproducibility and Replication in Science. The Harvard Data Science Review, an open access platform of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, has a primary emphasis on reproducibility, replicability, and readability, along with broad Data Science topics.
Stodden served as a member of the NASEM's Committee on Reproducibility and Replicability and coauthored the committee's 2019 report that examined computational reproducibility and replicability in science. The report, which was based on a study sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, recommends strategies that will allow "researchers, academic institutions, journals, and funders [to] help strengthen rigor and transparency in order to improve the reproducibility and replicability of scientific research."
According to Stodden, the special issue of the Harvard Data Science Review provides context for the complexity of the topics of reproducibility and replicability and its broad span of issues from research training, experimental design, statistical methodology, data collection and archiving, and dissemination and communication to the public. Among the twelve articles included in this issue is "Trust but Verify: How to Leverage Policies, Workflows, and Infrastructure to Ensure Computational Reproducibility in Publication," in which authors Stodden and Craig Willis (PhD '20) examine publisher policy responses to reproducibility.
Stodden's research addresses a wide range of topics, including standards of openness for data and code sharing, legal and policy barriers to disseminating reproducible research, robustness in replicated findings, cyberinfrastructure to enable reproducibility, and scientific publishing practices. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering Online Ethics Center Advisory Group and National Institute of Statistical Sciences, and a member-at-large of the Statistics section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
At Illinois, Stodden holds faculty affiliate appointments in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Coordinated Science Lab, College of Law, Department of Statistics, and Department of Computer Science. She earned her PhD in statistics from Stanford University and her law degree from Stanford Law School.