The Experimental Software Engineering (ESE) area investigates improvements that can be considered in carried out Software Engineering (SE) experiments. During the life cycle of an experiment, different artifacts are developed, such as, processes, scripts and data. These artifacts straightforwardly contribute to increase the capability of experiments reproducibility, thus, consequently, to SE evolution. Organizing such artifacts into proper experimental/laboratory packages facilitates their comprehension for prospective findings and reproducibility. The lack of reproducibility for SE results and experiments has been explained in the current literature. However, such artifacts treatment usually fails, thus jeopardizing findings and external reproductions to confirm and audit SE experiments. In this context, this paper describes a research work in progress for the development of an open science-based framework that aids in the management of SE experimental data. Specific data and metadata groups will be formed and integrated to formally describe SE experiments, in terms of open science common practices as preservation, provenance, curation, management, and data/metadata storage. The framework will support the elaboration of experimental packages, thus it intends to promote the reproducibility of SE controlled experiments and quasi-experiments.

Open Science can be seen as a movement that has been spread out by the scientific community of all areas. In this movement, practices that seek to facilitate the sharing of research artifacts are considered. Possible artifacts include articles, data, scripts, and processes. In this paper, we present and discuss the results of a survey on open science carried out in the context of the State University of Maringá (UEM) in Brazil. Such a survey is aimed at investigating the degree of knowledge about open science from lecturers who supervise Master’s degree students and PhD candidates. The university has currently 54 graduate programs, distributed in different centers, encompassing almost 900 lecturers. We collected data using a web questionnaire with 22 questions. In total, 90 lecturers answered our survey. Results show that a significant subset of respondents never heard about open science, whereas the complementary subset barely dealt with the open science principles, tools or license types. We then provide in this paper a set of assumptions on several open science-related subjects. In addition, this paper might be used to guide any other university to measure the degree level of open science knowledge and to provide a plan to inspire the institutionalization of such an extremely relevant scientific topic.