Description of the special session:

In this scope, the goal of this Special Session is to foster and promote the underrepresented types of research work that are indispensable for strengthening our community's trustworthiness: Replication Studies, Efficient Open Research Data Reuse and relevant Metaresearch.

Novelty and motivation:

The community of indoor positioning research has identified the significance of directing toward a more reproducible and open paradigm of research. Over the last years, a slowly increasing tendency to openly share data and code has been observed in the field, while the annual recurrence of the IPIN competition contributes to the establishment of baselines and benchmarks, assisting the reproducibility, verifiability, and comparability of scientific methods and results.

Nevertheless, accompanying research results with new Open Research Data (ORD) or relying on consistent usage of public ORD in novel works, does not yet constitute the de facto standard option in Indoor Positioning, as it does in other fields such as, for instance, in Machine Learning research. Parallelly, in the broader context of the elaboration for an Open and Reproducible Science, it has been underlined that a potential systematic favouring of novel findings and confirmatory results over negative results or replication studies would have tremendous drawbacks. Indicatively, it would facilitate the perpetuation of false knowledge, erroneous experiment conclusions, or inconsistent comparisons, as all these would remain indefinitely unchallenged.

Scope of the session:

In this Special Session, we invite authors to submit papers related (but not limited) to:

• Replication studies, that allow the examination of how well published methods, results, and the claims made about them generalize when applied to new settings, by using open datasets. Open and reusable code is indispensable.
• State of the Art definition of a certain problem addressed by the literature of the field, by implementing and testing several relevant published (or new) methods on multiple different ORDs. Open and reusable code is indispensable.
• Surveys providing a literature review of ORD practices, tools, platforms, and relevant available datasets and code/software in Indoor Positioning, or evaluating their potential in facilitating reproducibility.
• Metaresearch on replicability, on the use of ORD in indoor positioning research, andon evaluating the current extent of (re)use of ORD in the field.

Keywords:

• Open Research Data
• Replication Studies
• Reproducibility
• Data Reuse
• Metaresearch
• Open Science

Session chairs:

• Dr. Grigorios Anagnostopoulos (University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland)
• Dr. Joaquín Torres-Sospedra (University of València)

Invited reviewers:

• Dr. Paolo Barsocchi (Information Science and Technologies Institute)
• Dr. Antonino Crivello (Institute of Information Science and Technologies)
• Prof. Ivo Silva (University of Minho)
• Prof. Cristiano Pendão (University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro)