I'm late to the party (summer of holidays), but here's an oldie from xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/1205/

I certainly agree that quantifying the time saved is important. Putting
numbers to it is difficult, though. I'm working on a rural digital economy
project, and we're trying to quantify how access to better
skills/infrastructure would save businesses money. Short of installing
activity loggers on folks computers, a user guesstimate seems to be the
only way!

On 24 May 2017 at 18:35, Ben Marwick <[email protected]> wrote:

> I love this wonderful paper and interview, and the OHI is a great
> inspiration for me, I recommend it to everyone.
>
> We now seem to have an emerging genre of scholarly papers spanning a
> variety of disciplines that describe this way of working. I think this is
> great, a big win for the influence of the ideals and practices of SWC, and
> an important step towards improving research reproducibility and openness.
>
> I would like to propose we raise the bar a bit for future papers in this
> genre, especially about claims of 'less time' and 'saving time'. So far as
> I'm aware, most of these claims are qualitative, and not based on objective
> measurements of time. A challenge for future papers in this genre is to
> include some measurements of how much time is saved.
>
> I believe that these claims of saved time are probably true, but I'd love
> to have something more robust to show my skeptical students and colleagues,
> who often ask me about this (and don't find reproducibility to be
> sufficient motivation). Wouldn't it be great to see some actual numbers on
> how much time is saved using reproducible workflows and open source tools?
>
> Are there any compelling studies already published on this?
>
> BM
>
> On 24/05/2017 7:56 AM, Julia Stewart Lowndes wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I wanted to share our Perspective article that was published yesterday
>> in /Nature Ecology & Evolution. /My experience as a learner and
>> instructor with Software Carpentry definitely played a role in writing
>> this paper, and we cite the Carpentries throughout the
>> article. /Nature /also did a Q&A with me that gives a quick overview of
>> the paper.
>>
>>     Lowndes JSS, Best BD, Scarborough C, Afflerbach JC, Frazier MR,
>>     O’Hara CC, Jiang N, Halpern BS (2017). Our path to better science in
>>     less time using open data science tools. /Nature Ecology &
>>     Evolution/, 1 Article number:
>>     0160. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0160
>>     <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0160>
>>
>>     <http://blogs.nature.com/naturejobs/2017/05/23/techblog-
>> julia-stewart-lowndes>Perkel,
>>     J. 2017. TechBlog: My digital toolbox: Julia Stewart
>>     Lowndes, /Nature./ http://blogs.nature.com/nature
>> jobs/2017/05/23/techblog-julia-stewart-lowndes
>>     <http://blogs.nature.com/naturejobs/2017/05/23/techblog-
>> julia-stewart-lowndes>
>>
>>
>> We’ve also made a website using the tools that we describe in the
>> paper: ohi-science.org/betterscienceinlesstime
>> <http://ohi-science.org/betterscienceinlesstime>. We have resources
>> there and I’ll keep a list of any media attention, including a Q&A I did
>> with /Nature/ that should be coming out later today.
>>
>>
>> We are also tweeting about it from @ohiscience
>> <https://twitter.com/OHIscience> and @juliesquid
>> <https://twitter.com/juliesquid>.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Julie et al.
>>
>>
>> *Abstract: *
>>
>>     Reproducibility has long been a tenet of science but has been
>>     challenging to achieve—we learned this the hard way when our old
>>     approaches proved inadequate to efficiently reproduce our own work.
>>     Here we describe how several free software tools have fundamentally
>>     upgraded our approach to collaborative research, making our entire
>>     workflow more transparent and streamlined. By describing specific
>>     tools and how we incrementally began using them for the Ocean Health
>>     Index project, we hope to encourage others in the scientific
>>     community to do the same—so we can all produce better science in
>>     less time.
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Julia Stewart Lowndes, PhD
>> Ocean Health Index
>> National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
>> University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)
>> website <http://jules32.github.io/> • ohi-science
>> <http://ohi-science.org/>• github <https://github.com/jules32> • twitter
>> <https://twitter.com/juliesquid>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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