Here’s an interview with Pieter Van Gorp about SHARE, a tool to share a research environment, allowing others to reproduce your results.

I got pointed to another recent article published as a column in Nature:

Nick Barnes, Publish your computer code: it is good enough, Nature 467, 753 (2010), doi:10.1038/467753a.

Many very recognizable arguments pro (and contra) putting your code online! I enjoyed reading it, hope you will do the same.

It’s already quite some time ago, so it became highly time for a new post. This is definitely not by lack of interesting topics to blog about, it’s more related to a continued lack of time…

Anyway, I was reading last week about the Open Source Software Competition at ACM Multimedia this year. I didn’t know about it yet, but this seems to be a yearly event. Some more information about it is available here. In this competition, a short paper describing the software has to be submitted together with the entire open source software package. On the page, it is also clearly written that reviewers will make a reasonable attempt at testing and running the software, and submissions that don’t run will be rejected. I think this is a great event, and would like to congratulate the winners!

At the same time, I believe this also raises a question: Why is it that we have to create a separate competition for this, and do not have these same conditions (of being able to verify results) for regular conference or journal submissions? Is it too much to require both novelty (which I believe is less strictly checked in this competition), and (easy) reproducibility from paper submissions?