Welcome!

Did you ever:

• have to go back to the regression code you wrote months ago to replicate a table that a referee wants slightly different and been unable to trace how in hell it was created in the first place?
• think that it would be nice if you could easily access the code for that relevant paper whose results do not make much sense?
• suffer from a disk failure and lost some of your files because no backup was in place?
• argue with co-authors which document version was the latest?

A recent controversy over a Harvard study (link) shows that there is clearly a need for more transparency and better practices in the way economic research is carried out. At the same time, government (example) institutions and universities (example) are also progressively pushing for a more open and reproducibility-prone policy in the way publicly funded research is made available. We will discuss why these initiatives are important and how you can start adopting them in the way you conduct research day-to-day.

This is the main site of the Workshop on open Workflows (WooW). Here you will find the slides used in the session, code snippets shown as examples as well as a list of further references on much of the material covered. Although the slides and examples will likely not change after the workshop, it is our intent to update the references to include more resources we find useful.

What

The seminar will be divided in two parts: first, a conceptual introduction will cover why and what particular best practices should be followed when carrying out research in economics; a second, longer and more practical part will introduce and illustrate some of the most commonly used tools that reflect the principles outlined before. This will include, among others:

• Plain text editors
• LaTeX and other markup typesetting systems
• Bibliography managers
• Command-line statistical packages like Stata, R or Python
• Backup and version control systems.

Given time constraints and for the sake of keeping it general we will give an overview of what such tools are but will not cover any of them in depth (e.g., this is not a tutorial on Stata or LaTeX).

When

Thursday January the 16th., 2014. from 15:00 to 17:00.

Where

Room 1G-10 of the main VU building.

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Who

The workshop was originally conceived by Dani Arribas-Bel and Thomas De Graaff, both based in the Department of Spatial Economics at the VU University Amsterdam.

How

This website as well as all the material included and used at the workshop are hosted as an open GitHub repository at this url. This means you can clone it and access not only the entire website and materials but also the revision history tracked using git. Alternatively, you can download a compressed file with the components.

All materials included in the site are licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 open license, which means you can use, remix and redistribute them freely as long as you give proper attribution.

"Workshop on open Workflows" by Daniel Arribas-Bel and Thomas De Graaff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.