Template repository for a single point of access meta-repository to reproduce an experiment
A meta-repository creates a single point of access for someone to find all of the components that were used to create a published work for the purpose of reproducibility. This repository should contain references to all minted data and software as well as house any ancillary code used to transform the source data, create figures for your publication, conduct the experiment, and / or execute the contributing software.
Simply click Use this template
on the main repository page (shows up to the left of Clone or download
) and fill in your Repository name
, the Description
, select whether you want the repository to be Public
or Private
, and leave Include all branches
unchecked.
The following naming conventions should be used when naming your repository:
- Single author:
lastname_year_journal
- Multi author:
lastname-etal_year_journal
- Multiple publications in the same journal:
lastname-etal_year-letter_journal
(e.g.,human-etal_2020-b_nature
)
A general .gitignore
for use with Python or R development is included. However, you may wish to customize this to the needs of your project. The .gitignore
file lets Git know what to push to the remote repository and what needs to be ignored and stay local.
- Don't bog down your repository with a bunch of raw data. Instead archive and mint a DOI for your data and provide the reference in this repository with instructions for use.
- Create complete and tested documentation for how to use what is in this repository to reproduce your experiment.
It is important to version and release your meta-repository as well due to changes that may occur during the publication review process. If you do not know how to conduct a release on GitHub when linked with Zenodo, please contact [email protected] to get set up.
A sample meta-repository template is provided in this repository in the file metarepo_template.md
.
To use it, do the following:
- Create the template repository as mentioned above in Using the template
- Clone your new repository to you local machine
- Change directories into your new meta-repository directory you just cloned
- Run
git rm README.md
to delete this file (README.md
) and commit it usinggit commit -m 'remove instructions'
- Rename
metarepo_template.md
asREADME.md
- Run
git add README.md
to stage the new file that will show up on load in your remote GitHub repository - Run
git rm metarepo_template.md
to remove the original template - Run
git commit -m 'set up new template as readme'
to set the changes - Run
git push
to send the changes to your remote GitHub repository - Modify the
README.md
file to represent your experiement and use theadd
,commit
,push
workflow to update your remote repository