In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper provided important evidence regarding the effect of misinformation on vaccination intent. Its analyses and conclusions were extremely important for decision makers. Therefore, it is also important that the analyses are reproducible.
The direct numerical simulations (DNS) for this paper were conducted using Basilisk (http://basilisk.fr/). As Basilisk is a free software program written in C, it can be readily installed on any Linux machine, and it should be straightforward to then run the driver code to re-produce the DNS from this paper. Given this, the numerical solutions presented in this paper are a result of many high-fidelity simulations, which each took approximately 24 CPU hours running between 4 to 8 cores. Hence the difficulty in reproducing the results should mainly be in the amount of computational resources it would take, so HPC resources will be required. The DNS in this paper were used to validate the presented analytical solutions, as well as extend the results to a longer timescale. Reproducing these numerical results will build confidence in these results, ensuring that they are independent of the system architecture they were produced on.
The method is trained on the data that were available, but it is meant to be re-trainable as soon as new data are published. It would be great to be really sure that even someone else will be able to do it. In case we receive any feedback, we would be really happy to improve our Github repository so as to make the reproduction easier!
Even though the approach in the paper focuses on a specific measurement (clumped isotopes) and how to optimize which and how many standards we use, I hope that the problem is general enough that insight can translate to any kind of measurement that relies on machine calibration. I've committed to writing a literate program (plain text interspersed with code chunks) to explain what is going on and to make the simulations one step at a time. I really hope that this is understandable to future collaborators and scientists in my field, but I have not had any code review internally and I also didn't receive any feedback on it from the reviewers. I would love to see if what in my mind represents "reproducible code" is actually reproducible, and to learn what I can improve for future projects!
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.
This paper shows a fun and interesting simulation result. I find it (of course) very important that our results are reproducible. In this paper, however, we did not include the exact code for these specific simulations, but the results should be reproducible using the code of our previous paper in PLOS Computational Biology (Van Oers, Rens et al. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003774). I am genuinely curious to see if there is sufficient information for the Biophys J paper or if we should have done better. Other people have already successfully built upon the 2014 (PLOS) paper using our code; see e.g., https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.97.012408 and https://doi.org/10.1101/701037).
