There are many applications to multi-MeV X-rays. Their penetrative properties make them good for scanning dense objects for industry, and their ionising properties can destroy tumours in radiotherapy. They are also around the energy of nuclear transitions, so they can trigger nuclear reactions to break down nuclear waste into medical isotopes, or to reveal smuggled nuclear-materials for port security. Laser-driven X-ray generation offers a compact and efficient way to create a bright source of X-rays, without having to construct a large synchrotron. To fully utilise this capability, work on optimising the target design and understanding the underlying X-ray mechanisms are essential. The hybrid-PIC code is in a unique position to model the full interaction, so its ease-of-use and reproducibility are crucial for this field to develop.
Because: - Two fellow PhDs working on different topics have been able to reproduce some figures by following the README instructions and I hope this extends to other people - I've tried to incorporate as many of the best practices as possible to make my code and data open and accessible - I've tried to make sure that my data is exactly reproducible with the specified random seed strategy - the paper suggests a method that should be useful to other researchers in my field, which is not useful unless my results are reproducible
The paper describes pyKNEEr, a python package for open and reproducible research on femoral knee cartilage using Jupyter notebooks as a user interface. I created this paper with the specific intent to make both the workflows it describes and the paper itself open and reproducible, following guidelines from authorities in the field. Therefore, two things in the paper can be reproduced: 1) workflow results: Table 2 contains links to all the Jupyter notebooks used to calculate the results. Computations are long and might require a server, so if you want to run them locally, I recommend using only 2 or 3 images as inputs for the computations. Also, the paper should be sufficient, but if you need further introductory info, there are a documentation website: https://sbonaretti.github.io/pyKNEEr/ and a "how to" video: https://youtu.be/7WPf5KFtYi8 2) paper graphs: In the captions of figures 1, 4, and 5 you can find links to data repository, code (a Jupyter notebook), and the computational environment (binder) to fully reproduce the graph. These computations can be easily run locally and require a few seconds. All Jupyter notebooks automatically download data from Zenodo and provide dependencies, which should make reproducibility easier.
The original data took quite a while to produce for a previous paper, but for this paper, all tables and figures should be exactly reproducible by simply running the jupyter notebook.
This was my third attempt at making a paper fully reproducible. To date I it's the most reproducible that I have published. I'm interested to know what stumbling blocks exist that I'm not aware of (aside from needing software like ArcGIS to fully rerun the complete analysis).
