I seem to be dwelling quite some time on the web lately… After my post about the lifetime of URLs, here’s one about domain names and reproducibility. I recently noticed when looking around that there are quite some websites and domain names related to reproducible research.

reproducibleresearch.org is an overview website by John D. Cook containing links to reproducible research projects, articles about the topics, and relevant tools. It also contains a blog about reproducible ideas.

reproducibleresearch.com is owned by the people at Blue Reference, who created Inference for Office, a commercial tool to perform reproducible research from within Microsoft Office.

reproducibility.org is used by Sergey Fomel and his colleagues as home for their Madagascar open source package for reproducible research experiments.

reproducible.org is a reproducible research archive maintained by R. Peng at Johns Hopkins School, where the goal is to host a place for reproducible research packages.

Quite a range of domain names containing the word “reproducible” (or a derivative), if you ask me! And then I didn’t even start about the Open Research or Research 2.0 sites. Let’s hope this also means that research itself will soon see a big boost in reproducibility!

I am getting worried these days about the volatility of URLs and web pages. I guess you all know the problem: it is very easy to create a web page, and hence many people do so. Great! However, after some years, only few of those web pages are still available. Common reasons include people retiring, or moving to other places, and therefore their web pages at their employer’s site disappear. Similarly, registering a domain name at some point in time does not mean you will keep on paying the yearly fees forever. Or also, web sites getting an entire re-design often result in broken URLs.

Why does this worry me so much?

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Reproducible research, literate programming, open science, and science 2.0. All different namings, and (in my opinion) all covering largely the same topic: sharing code and/or data complementing a publication as a presentation of your research work. While literate programming is more focused on adding documentation to code, and science 2.0 seems to include the assumption that you put work in progress online, there really seems to be a very large intersection between these topics.

This clearly shows that from various sides of the scientific community, in very different fields of science, the same ideas pop up. That is a really exciting thing! And at the same time it also shows that there is a clear need for such open publication of a piece of research. And I think everyone will agree that there would be nothing nicer than being able to really start from the current state-of-the-art when starting to do research in a certain field?

Should all these efforts be merged under a single “label”? It would definitely be exciting. And it would create a huge impact, as a joint effort for “open science”, “reproducible research”, or whatever the name may be, would receive a lot of attention, and cannot be overlooked by anyone anymore. At the same time, every research domain needs other specifics or finetuning, and it is not clear to me now what the “best” setup would be for the type of work I am doing now. So maybe we should let these variations co-exist for some more time, and see later which ones survive, are the simplest to use, and which tools can be combined to create an optimal method for research.

But of course (if anyone is reading these posts), I would be very happy to hear your own opinion on this!