Research data. Who cares?

Today I attended the mini-symposium “Research data. Who cares?“, organized by Leon Osinski at TU Eindhoven. The symposium was organized at the startup of the 3TU.Data Centre, an organization by the 3 Dutch Technical Universities’ libraries for the storage, sharing and preservation of research data. I gave a presentation there about my experiences with reproducible research.

Another presentation there that I liked a lot was given by Pieter Van Gorp, about “SHARE” (Sharing Hosted Autonomous Research Environments). This is an exciting setup he developed. It allows a researcher to put his research results in a safe and well-controlled environment on a virtual machine. Other researchers can then login to that virtual machine, and reproduce the results in exactly the same environment as used by the author, as if they are working on the author’s machine. While I am not entirely sure yet about its advantage for my typical Matlab scripts (that do not require complex installations), it is certainly of tremendous help when presenting more complex tools and results. Seems like a great step towards one-click reproducing of results, and I am certainly going to try it out!

One thought on “Research data. Who cares?

  1. Pieter Van Gorp

    Hi Patrick,
    thanks for your enthusiasm about SHARE.

    I would like to point you to a band new initiative: http://planet-research20.org/ser2009/index.php?option=com_community&view=profile&Itemid=93 That community site should be filled with nice content pretty soon.

    Apart from that, do you mind making people aware of SHARE on http://reproducibleresearch.net/index.php/How_to ? I think especially for those who are currently reluctant to make their research reproducible due to licensing and ownership issues can be convinced “to SHARE” while they cannot so easily be convinced to upload code and data to a public/uncontrolled download site such as http://rr.epfl.ch/ I don’t want to go too much off-topic in this post; instead, I propose to extend your HOWTO and link to the SHARE article as soon as it is published.

    Reply

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