Guide to the research lifecycle in DP-Next
Luke W. Johnston 
Welcome!
This guide mostly follows the diátaxis “how-to guide” style, though not strictly. It is a living and constantly evolving guide that is regularly updated as we learn and refine how we work and develop data packages. We intend to continually update and release every update to the guide to Zenodo and as GitHub releases. We don’t expect this guide to ever be considered “done”.
There are surprisingly few, practical resources and how-to guides for learning about and doing effective collaboration within research, especially in the context of open science and reproducibility. The few resources that do exist are more theoretical than the practice “how do I actually do it?” aspects.
In particular, few research groups and institutions develop and curate their own guide on how they do things. This makes it very difficult to learn as a new (or established) researcher how others do things, so that we can draw inspiration from or build off of how others work and do research. Often these skills are gained through verbal knowledge sharing or from watching how peers or other group members work. This makes it difficult to apply any type of scientific reasoning, critical thinking, and analysis to these collaborative, open scientific, and reproducible practices.
This guide is an attempt at documenting and sharing how we aspire to and aim to work within the DP-Next project.
Who you are
We’ve written these documents with a few types of people in mind:
- DP-Next collaborators/group members: These people are our primary audience for this guide. If you work with us in DP-Next, these documents are designed and developed with you in mind.
- Researchers not affiliated with DP-Next: If you work in another organization or group, we write these documents to share our practices with you. You can use this either as a guide or as a reference to help you improve your own work or to draw inspiration from for how you structure your research and collaboration.
- Group or organisation leaders: If you are a leader of a group or institution, we write this guide to show how a group of researchers could work together in more effective ways. You can use this guide to get inspiration for how you can design your own group or institution to work better together at producing open and reproducible research.
Contributing
Check out our contributing document for information on how to contribute to this guide.
Changes
Check out our changelog for information on what has changed in each version of the guide. Previous versions can be found in the releases page of the GitHub repository.
How the website is made
The website and PDF (download link on the top of the website’s sidebar) are created using Quarto to write the material and create the book format. GitHub hosts the Git repository of the material, while GitHub Actions builds and releases the book with every change. Netlify hosts the website and manages the domain. The source material is in the guide GitHub repository.