The Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne has introduced an online journal fore reproducible research at: <http://rr.epfl.ch/17/>
The introductory headline reads: Have you ever tried to reproduce the results presented in a research paper? For many of our current publications, this would unfortunately be a challenging task. For a computational algorithm, details such as the exact dataset, initialization or termination procedures and precise parameter values are often omitted in the publication for various reasons. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for someone else to obtain the same results. To address the problem, we have started making our research reproducible. Instead of only describing the developed algorithms to ‘sufficient’ precision in an article, we give readers access to all the information (code, data, schemes, etc.) that was used to produce the presented results as first advocated by Knuth and Claerbout. We are convinced that making research reproducible is not only a matter of good practice, but also increases the impact of our publications and makes it easier to build upon each other’s work. It is a clear win-win situation for our community: we will have access to more and more algorithms and can spend time inventing new things rather than recreating existing ones. I am a firm believer in Knuth's Literate Programming and in the need to have full publication of the program as well as the research paper in the field of computational mathematics (CM). Too often in the CM area the only surviving artifact of an algorithm is a 5 page paper in a conference publication. There is no need to limit publications to the constraint of paper. Conference proceedings can be published electronically. With the adoption of some reasonable, minimal standards it should be possible to "drag-and-drop" a paper onto a running system and have it installed immediately. Indeed, it could even occur at the conference while attending the talk which would allow the audience to run the algorithm immediately. Combining the research paper with the actual code will raise the standard of publication and encourage standardization of the CM algorithms. If, in addition, the publication license allowed others to make derivative algorithms we could see a whole history of the development of important results (say, new Groebner basis enhancements) with a clear history of prior art. Tim Daly _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer