Transparency

Transparency means that the research process is open and comprehensible to others (and to your future self). A transparent project makes it clear:

What data was collected or used.
How it was processed, transformed, and analyzed.
Why particular decisions were made along the way.
Where the data and code can be found.

STAMPED principles support transparency through detailed provenance records, human-readable metadata, public version control histories, and well-documented data organization. When every step of a research project is recorded and accessible, collaborators and reviewers can follow the entire chain from raw data to published results. Transparency builds trust and enables meaningful peer review of not just the conclusions, but the process that produced them.

Walkthrough: stellar distances from Gaia parallax

12 March 2026·14 mins

Reproducibility Rigor Transparency Reusable Accessible Workflow S — Self-contained T — Tracked A — Actionable M — Modular P — Portable E — Ephemeral D — Distributable STAMPED-intro gaia parallax walkthrough python datalad make

Incrementally builds a research object from a bare script to a tracked, portable, reproducible pipeline — motivated by real problems, not by acronym order.

From Script to STAMPED Research Object

20 February 2026·9 mins

Reproducibility Rigor Transparency Reusable Accessible Pattern S — Self-contained T — Tracked A — Actionable M — Modular P — Portable E — Ephemeral D — Distributable STAMPED-intro shell POSIX awk make git singularity containers

Four scenarios showing how to incrementally add STAMPED properties to a shell-based analysis using git, make, and singularity.

Datasette and MVC Pattern for Actionable Data Exploration

19 February 2026·8 mins

Transparency Efficiency Accessible Interoperable Pattern A — Actionable S — Self-contained datasette MVC data-exploration sqlite

Shows how datasette turns static datasets into interactive, queryable web applications following an MVC-like pattern.

Ephemeral Shell Scripts for Reproducing Issues

19 February 2026·6 mins

Reproducibility Rigor Transparency Reusable Accessible Pattern S — Self-contained A — Actionable E — Ephemeral P — Portable shell POSIX reproducer bug-report testing

Distills a common practice among open-source developers: writing throwaway shell scripts that set up a fresh environment, reproduce a problem, and can be shared as actionable bug reports or starting points for test cases.

Recording Computational Provenance with 'datalad run'

19 February 2026·6 mins

Reproducibility Transparency Reusable Tool T — Tracked A — Actionable datalad provenance reproducibility

Shows how ‘datalad run’ wraps arbitrary commands to record inputs, outputs, and the exact command in machine-reexecutable form.