Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, July 14, 2007

OA for text, data, and code to make research reproducible

The Audiovisual Communications Laboratory at Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has an enlightened policy on Reproducible Research, which takes seriously the fact that removing access barriers facilitates reproducibility.  (Thanks to Patrick Vandewalle.)  From its RR page:

In our lab, we try to make our research reproducible. This means that all the results from a paper can be reproduced with the code and data available online.

Reproducible papers from our lab

Join us in a discussion about the use of reproducible research and how to make it work on our reproducible research forum!

For the latest news on reproducible research, please have a look at our RR Blog! ...

Of course, it all starts with a good description of the theory, algorithm, or experiments in the paper. A block diagram or a pseudo-code description can do miracles! Once this is done, make a web page containing the following information:

  1. Title
  2. Authors (with links to the authors' websites)
  3. Abstract
  4. Full reference of your paper, with current publication status, and a PDF of your paper
  5. All the code to reproduce all the results, images and tables. Make sure all the code is well documented, and that there is a readme file explaining how to execute it
  6. All the data (images, measurements, etc) to reproduce all the results, images and tables. Add a readme file explaining what the data represent
  7. A list of configurations on which you tested your code (software version, platform)
  8. An e-mail address that people can use for comments and remarks (and to report bugs) ...

For examples, see the list of reproducible papers above. Note that we are currently working on an automated setup using EPrints to simplify this process. Keep an eye on this webpage!