Reproducibility of science

We want to contribute to the preservation of the Web of Knowledge, in particular in the scientific world. This page contains a description of the issues identified in this kind of efforts, and provides pointers to related works in each of the identified relevant areas.

Analysis

A general effort for studying reproducibility in Computer Science is led by Christian Collberg collberg@gmail.com. The running results are presented on http://reproducibility.cs.arizona.edu/

There are several main issues identified in this area... the first two are precisely where Software Heritage helps.

Availability

This is the possibility of getting some code that is related to the scientific experiment. The main threat to availability are involuntary code loss, due to accidental deletion or destruction.

Traceability/Integrity

This is the possibility of permanently identifying the code that is connected to a specific scientific experiment, and verifying its integrity. The main threat to traceability is the broken link phaenomenon that is being extensively studied today.

References

• Traceability
  • Lawrence, S. et al. Persistence of Web References in Scientific Research, IEEE Computer, 34(2), pp. 26–31, 2001.
  • Diomidis Spinellis. The Decay and Failures of URL References. Communications of the ACM, 46(1):71-77, January 2003.
  • Martin Klein, Herbert Van de Sompel, Robert Sanderson, Harihar Shankar, Lyudmila Balakireva, Ke Zhou, Richard Tobin, Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot; December 2014 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115253

See also

• Reproducible research