[Lars Vilhuber]

Hi Iain,
thanks for sharing, very interesting. Two questions:
* Github repo for code is not the same as a trusted repository (for data). The owner of the repository can delete it at any time. How does that factor into the strategy here (for PLOS, or others)? At the American Economic Association, we do not accept Github repositories – code has to be permanently archived somewhere in a trusted repository.
* There is “mandatory policies”, and there are “enforced mandatory policies”. Personally, I have found quite a few (not PLOS) linked data repositories that contained fundamentally non-functional code (code stored as PDF, code that was patently not functional and easy to assess if anybody had looked at it), or that simply did not exist (e.g., the code availability statement directed to a repo that did not exist, or that did not contain what it was supposed to contain). We actively verify for all replication packages whether the data and code exist at the location indicated (and in many cases, we actively attempt to verify that the code actually runs, but that’s not the point here). I.e., we “enforce”/”verify compliance” with the policy, rather than just state it. What have you found in your own experience at PLOS about that, and what resources does your experience with the journals and publishers you have worked with suggest are needed?
*
Lars
—
Lars Vilhuber, Economist
Cornell University
p: +1.607-330-5743
https://calendly.com/larsvilhuber
– Show quoted text -From: ***@***.***-groups.org on behalf of iainh_z via Data policy standardisation and implementation IG
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2022 07:28
To: Data policy standardisation and implementation IG
Subject: [rda-data-policy-standardisation-ig] Which solutions best support sharing and reuse of code?
Dear all,
I thought this would be of interest to the RDA data policy community. PLOS has released a preprint and supporting data on research conducted to understand the needs and habits of computational biology researchers in relation to code sharing and reuse, as well as to gather feedback on prototype code notebooks and help determine strategies that publishers could use to increase code sharing. There is a summary of the research on the PLOS Blog.
The results have not been peer-reviewed but will be submitted to a journal shortly. The findings of our survey have shown us that whilst researchers recognise the benefits that using code sharing technology bring, such as sharing data and code in the correct environment and allowing readers to easily change parameters, there may be insufficient incentives for researchers to carry out these tasks routinely when publishing in a journal. Most researchers in our survey (n=188) appear to be satisfied with the community norm of sharing code via a code repository such as github. While technological solutions – such as executable code capsules and code notebooks — may help researchers in other ways, to support our goal of increasing sharing and reuse of code, PLOS Computational Biology’s focus on a mandatory policy seems to be the optimal approach.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Kind regards,
Iain
Iain Hrynaszkiewicz
Director, Open Research Solutions
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