Evaluating Open Science Practices in Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation Research : A Survey of the IPIN’s Reference Papers of 2022 and 2023 Editions

The importance of reproducibility and transparency in scientific research has always been a cornerstone of the scientific Ethos. Recently, after identifying the challenges in terms of reproducibility in various research fields, the necessity of wide adoption of Open Science practices has become prominent. The field of Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation is no exception to these realizations. The current work provides a comprehensive review of Open Science practices followed in recent publications in the field, analyzing all reference papers from the 2022 and 2023 editions of the International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN). Particularly, the level of use of open data, open code, and open materials, is studied. Moreover, for all works relying on Open Research Data (ORD), our analysis went a step deeper characterizing multiple relevant features describing the data used, such as the technologies, the measurement types, and the environments associated with the open data. Our findings reveal that 22.4% of papers use open research data, 10.5% utilize open code, and 21.1% incorporate other open materials. However, only 7.9% of papers provide both open data and code. This study underscores the need for wider adoption of those practices, to enhance the transparency, reproducibility, replicability, and reliability of research outcomes of the field of indoor positioning. The files containing the complete characterization of the reviewed publications and of the Open Science practices followed are publicly available in [1].