Policies for Scientific Integrity and Reproducibility: Data and Code Sharing

As computation emerges as central to the scientific enterprise, new modalities are necessary to ensure scientific findings are reproducible. Without access to the underlying code and data, it is all but impossible to reproducible today’s published computational scientific results. As seen in recent widely reported events, such as Climategate and the clinical trials scandal at Duke University, a lack of transparency in computational research undermines public confidence in science as well as slowing scientific progress, engendering a credibility crisis.

In order to communicate scientific discoveries and knowledge through the release of the associated code and data, scientists face issues of copyright. In this talk I address copyright as a barrier to reproducible research and present open licensing solutions for computational science. My efforts, labeled The Reproducible Research Standard, are designed to realign the communication of modern computational scientific research with longstanding scientific norms.

With transparency in scientific research, a new era of access to computational science is at hand that does not confine understanding to specialists, but permits knowledge transfer not just between disciplines but to any interested person in the world with an internet connection.