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.
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.
In theory, reproducing this paper should only require a clone of a public Git repository, and the execution of a Makefile (detailed in the README of the paper repository at https://github.com/psychoinformatics-de/paper-remodnav). We've set up our paper to be dynamically generated, retrieving and installing the relevant data and software automatically, and we've even created a tutorial about it, so that others can reuse the same setup for their work. Nevertheless, we've for example never tried it out across different operating systems - who knows whether it works on Windows? We'd love to share the tips and tricks we found to work, and even more love feedback on how to improve this further.
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.
