Open Science is a movement that promotes transparency, accessibility, and reproducibility in scientific research. By making research processes and artefacts openly available, it enhances the rigour and credibility of scientific work while enabling broader participation, validation, and reuse by the community. Open Science plays an important role in strengthening collaboration between academia and industry, increasing the impact of research, and facilitating cumulative knowledge building in requirements engineering.

At REFSQ 2027, we continue the tradition of fostering Open Science practices within the requirements engineering community. The conference encourages authors to make their research outputs, such as data, models, tools, and study materials, accessible and reusable, thereby supporting more transparent and verifiable research.

REFSQ 2027 Open Science Policy

To foster open science and promote the accessibility, reusability, and long-term preservation of research artefacts in Requirements Engineering, REFSQ 2027 encourages authors to make the materials supporting their research openly available whenever possible.

Openly shared artefacts facilitate the verification of published results, enable replication and extension of existing work, support educational activities, and reduce duplication of effort across the community. At the same time, REFSQ recognises that legal, ethical, privacy, confidentiality, or intellectual property constraints may prevent the release of some materials. Authors are therefore encouraged to share as much as reasonably possible and to clearly explain any limitations preventing disclosure.

Data Availability Statement

Every submission must include a Data Availability Statement at the end of the paper, similarly to the acknowledgements section.

The statement should:

• describe the research artefacts accompanying the paper, such as datasets, source code, scripts, models, questionnaires, experimental material, or documentation;
• indicate where these artefacts can be accessed;
• specify any access restrictions, if applicable;
• explain why certain artefacts cannot be shared, when this is the case.

Recommendations for Shared Artefacts

Whenever possible, authors are encouraged to:

• deposit artefacts in a stable, publicly accessible repository that provides long-term preservation, such as Zenodo or Figshare;
• assign a persistent identifier to the artefact, such as a DOI provided by archival repositories including Zenodo or Figshare, and reference the artefact in the paper;
• organise the repository so that readers can easily locate the material supporting the paper;
• include an open-source licence or clearly specify the conditions under which the artefacts may be reused.

Documentation

To maximise the usefulness of shared artefacts, repositories should include a README file.

A good README should, where applicable:

• describe the purpose and contents of the repository;
• explain the repository structure;
• list the software requirements and dependencies;
• provide installation instructions, including platform-specific requirements when relevant;
• explain how to reproduce the analyses or experiments reported in the paper;
• indicate the expected outputs;
• explain how the provided scripts or configuration files can be adapted to execute the analyses on different datasets or inputs, when applicable.

The documentation should enable researchers outside the original project to understand how the artefacts are organised and how they can be reused.

Anonymous Artefacts for Double-Blind Review

REFSQ 2027 follows a double-blind review process. Consequently, any artefacts made available to reviewers during the review phase must preserve the anonymity of the authors, using the anonymisation features supported by the selected platform, where available.

Authors should ensure that:

• repositories, archived artefacts, and supplementary material do not reveal author identities or affiliations;
• repository names, URLs, metadata, commit histories, documentation, and file properties do not contain identifying information;
• README files and other documentation avoid references that could reveal the identity of the authors or their institutions.

After acceptance, authors are encouraged to update the repository with complete metadata, authorship information, and any additional documentation suitable for long-term dissemination.

Open Science Assessment

REFSQ 2027 adopts a lightweight Open Science assessment focused on the accessibility and documentation of shared artefacts.

The Open Science assessment verifies the presence of the declared artefacts and evaluates aspects such as:

• availability through a stable public repository;
• accessibility of the repository and files;
• presence of documentation, such as a README;
• sufficient information to understand the repository contents and how the artefacts are intended to be used.

The Open Science assessment does not attempt to independently reproduce or validate the experimental results reported in the paper.

Further Resources

Authors can find further support in the artefact management guideline established in the Requirements Engineering community, which includes practical, hands-on recommendations for authors who engage in open science. The guideline can be found here.