Philosophy: We strive to provide all of our codes and data in a way that our science is open, reproducible, facilitates collaborations, and promotes the work and career of junior scientists. 

Related: See Authorship Guidelines; TEE-Lab Git Repo.

Policy: Our lab policy is that all of our codes and data are available via open access Git-Hub repository upon publication.  We usually use MIT or GPL v3.0 license. For ongoing projects, all codes and data can be made available to all lab members even as the project is being progressed. 

The above rule is applicable to all lab members: The PI, Postdocs, PhD students, MSc/BSc thesis students (even those coming from outside of IISc to work in our lab), students hired on project funding, interns, etc.

Any exceptions to this must be discussed with the PI/adviser at the earliest.

(1) For example, a member who is “fully funded” on their own grants (for their stipend, resources for conducting research, etc) for their own ideas, methods, etc. PI plays little or no role in contributing to the project and the lab is merely acting as a hosting space. In such cases, adviser/PI has little role in code and data sharing policy too, unless explicitly invited to do so. Typically, such members are postdocs or faculty fellows (like INSPIRE faculty fellows, DST Women Scientist, etc) whose areas of work are intersecting with our lab’s theme but not directly related to research carried out in the lab. 

(2) A student working collaboratively with another lab, with a primary affiliation with the other lab. For example, a visiting student from a collaborator’s lab. We will evolve a sharing policy on a case by case basis.

As a lab policy, we encourage that everyone associated with the lab to put out all codes open access via Git-Hub repository. They may also be required to acknowledge certain PI grants in the publications arising out of such work, if they use lab facilities, even if the PI is not a coauthor.  

Specifics of code and data sharing: All students will create a Git-Hub login and are invited  to the lab git-hub account (https://github.com/tee-lab). They create a private repository for the ongoing project within the lab git-hub account (with no licence, with all rights reserved); in some cases, an ongoing project may also be made Public with open access license.

The project lead is encouraged to use features of git version control and directly update on git-hub. Alternatively, they can manually upload the latest codes at least once a month. This will also serve as a back up. 

Once the project is complete, the codes and data will continue to be jointly shared by the team members involved in the project (along with the PI) and will be published using an open access license (MIT or GPL). Lab may use the codes and data for future projects. If data files are large, only sample data files will be on Git-hub. The full data will be stored on lab data servers. 

For short-term students who contribute to coding and data generation for a longer-term project that may take more time to complete, we shall see if it is possible to create an open access repository that contains a module of your work. This will be decided on a case by case basis since we need to ensure that the overall long-term project is unaffected.  

All students who contribute substantially are generously involved in the follow up, including completion of manuscripts — in proportion to the ideas generated by them, the time invested and if they are willing to continue to work together. Authorship is decided based on guidelines in this Authorship Guidelines document. 

(Written with inputs from lab members, Sept/Oct 2021; we have been following this code and data sharing policy has been around for much longer, roughly since 2016. See our publication list where code and data are available for most publications.)