Designing a Reproducible and Collaborative Lab (RCL)

data-science

collaboration

reproducible-research

Authors

Julien Brun

Renata Curty

Greg Janée

Published

November 20, 2025

The Designing a Reproducible and Collaborative Lab (RCL) Program, currently piloted by the Research & Data Services (RDS) department at the UCSB Library, combines group workshops, self-paced learning, and personalized coaching sessions for Faculty and their Team(s) on the following topics:

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

Format

Scheduled at your convenience
4 whole lab workshops as a primer on a specific topic
Personalized coaching sessions focused on lab-specific needs

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
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

Want to know more?

You can read more on the RCL program in the UCSB Current article. If you are interested in this program, please see the about page to connect with us.

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@online{brun2025,
  author = {Brun, Julien and Curty, Renata and Janée, Greg},
  title = {Designing a {Reproducible} and {Collaborative} {Lab} {(RCL)}},
  date = {2025-11-20},
  url = {https://ucsb-library-research-data-services.github.io/reproducible-lab/},
  langid = {en}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Brun, Julien, Renata Curty, and Greg Janée. 2025. “Designing a Reproducible and Collaborative Lab (RCL).” November 20, 2025. https://ucsb-library-research-data-services.github.io/reproducible-lab/.