Sustainable computational science: the ReScience initiative
Abstract
Computer science offers a large set of tools for prototyping, writing, running, testing, validating, sharing and reproducing results, however computational science lags behind. In the best case, authors may provide their source code as a compressed archive and they may feel confident their research is reproducible. But this is not exactly true. James Buckheit and David Donoho proposed more than two decades ago that an article about computational results is advertising, not scholarship. The actual scholarship is the full software environment, code, and data that produced the result. This implies new workflows, in particular in peer-reviews. Existing journals have been slow to adapt: source codes are rarely requested, hardly ever actually executed to check that they produce the results advertised in the article. ReScience is a peer-reviewed journal that targets computational research and encourages the explicit replication of already published research, promoting new and open-source implementations in order to ensure that the original research can be replicated from its description. To achieve this goal, the whole publishing chain is radically different from other traditional scientific journals. ReScience resides on GitHub where each new implementation of a computational study is made available together with comments, explanations, and software tests.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1707.04393,
title = {Sustainable computational science: the ReScience initiative},
author = {Nicolas P. Rougier and Konrad Hinsen and Frédéric Alexandre and Thomas Arildsen and Lorena Barba and Fabien C. Y. Benureau and C. Titus Brown and Pierre de Buyl and Ozan Caglayan and Andrew P. Davison and Marc André Delsuc and Georgios Detorakis and Alexandra K. Diem and Damien Drix and Pierre Enel and Benoît Girard and Olivia Guest and Matt G. Hall and Rafael Neto Henriques and Xavier Hinaut and Kamil S Jaron and Mehdi Khamassi and Almar Klein and Tiina Manninen and Pietro Marchesi and Dan McGlinn and Christoph Metzner and Owen L. Petchey and Hans Ekkehard Plesser and Timothée Poisot and Karthik Ram and Yoav Ram and Etienne Roesch and Cyrille Rossant and Vahid Rostami and Aaron Shifman and Joseph Stachelek and Marcel Stimberg and Frank Stollmeier and Federico Vaggi and Guillaume Viejo and Julien Vitay and Anya Vostinar and Roman Yurchak and Tiziano Zito},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.04393},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
8 pages, 1 figure