1. 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 [Baker, 2016] 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.