“an article about computational result is advertising, not scholarship.
The actual scholarship is the full software environment, code and data, that produced the result.“
John Claerbout
We are all excited by the progress made by many authors to make their papers reproducible by publishing associated code and data. We know how challenging it can be so we want to showcase the value of the practice, both for original authors and as a learning experience for those who attempt to reproduce the work.
During a ReproHack, participants attempt to reproduce published research of their choice from a list of proposed papers with publicly available associated code and data. Participants get to work with other people’s material in a low pressure environment and record their experiences on a number of key aspects, including reproducibility, transparency and reusability of materials. At the end of the day we regroup, share our experiences and give feedback to the authors. It’s imperative to note that ReproHacks are by no means an attempt to criticise or discredit work. We see reproduction as beneficial scientific activity in itself, with useful outcomes for authors and valuable learning experiences for the participants and the research community as a whole.
The support of the N8 Centre of Excellence for Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR) funded by the N8 research partnership (Universities of Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York) is gratefully acknowledged.
The support of the EPSRC, BBSRC and ESRC supported Software Sustainability Institute is gratefully acknowledged.
The support of the University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering team is gratefully acknowledged.