Metadata annotation is key to reproducibility in sequencing experiments. Reproducing this research using the scripts provided will also show the current level of annotation in years since 2015 when the paper was published.
I tried hard to make this paper as reproducible as possible, but as techniques and dependencies become more complex, it is hard to make it 100% clear. Any form of feedback is more than welcome.
It uses the drake R package that should make reproducibility of R projects much easier (just run make.R and you're done). However, it does depend on very specific package versions, which are provided by the accompanying docker image.