# The importance of making research code accessible

In research, the dissemination of results is a common practice, but there exists a critical gap. While publishing data 
when publishing a research manuscript is getting more established, publishing the code used to get these results is not. 
A striking revelation from 2016 Nature survey conducted by Monya Baker {cite}`Baker2016` of 1,576 researchers underscores the 
issue: more than 70% of researchers struggled to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and a staggering 50% encountered 
difficulties in reproducing their own experiments. This alarming trend sheds light on a pressing crisis in research 
reproducibility, jeopardizing the credibility of scientific findings.

The heart of the matter lies in the omission of research scripts and code - the very essence of the analytical processes
shaping research outcomes. While research papers document results, the absence of the scripts used to generate these 
findings poses a significant barrier to the reproducibility of experiments. In an era where openness and collaboration 
are championed, this discrepancy in sharing the tools that drive research threatens the very foundation of scientific enquiry.

In this course we will look at two solutions to tackle the reproducibility crisis: literate programming and version control.