[Iain Hrynaszkiewicz]

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The results have not been peer-reviewed but will be submitted to a journal shortly.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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