reproducible science - panel at ievobio 2014

Reproducible SciencePanel at iEvoBio 2014

Hilmar LappNational Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent)

Disclosure(or call it perspective)

• Funded by NSF through BEACON for a series of workshops on developing reproducible science curriculum

• 3 principle questions:

• What practices, tools, and resources are available now?

• How best to teach these?

• What are the gaps faced by biologist users?

An experiment with sobering results

https://storify.com/hlapp/reproducibility-repeatability-bigthink

An experiment with sobering results

Main takeaways (distilled to tweets)

• software with many dependencies -> exponentially lower prob that all install

• holes or errors in docs -> harmless for experts, often fatal for "method novice"

• software evolution & rot -> parameters that worked 1 year ago now throw an error

• Non-domain reproducers harder: baseline software, packages differ #dependencyhell

http://ropensci.org/blog/2014/06/09/reproducibility/

“arguing that reproducibility is laudable in general glosses

over the fact that for each research group it is a

significant amount of work to make their research

(easily) reproducible for independent scientists”

“Any work you do to make your analysis more reproducible pays dividends for

colleagues and your future self.”

Jeremy Leipzig

For research to be reproducible, the parts need

to be available to start

Collberg et al (2014), Measuring Reproducibility in Computer Systems Research.http://reproducibility.cs.arizona.edu/tr.pdf

A huge tech soup• vagrant

• Ansible

• Docker

• Drone

• Travis

• knitr

• packrat

• VM memory limits

• VM storage limits

• VM uptime limits

• firewalls

• protected data

• data snapshotting

Reproducible science is a huge opportunity

for Research IT to enable & accelerate

science.