Guest Editors' Introduction: Reproducible Research

Abstract

The articles in this special issue provide independent solutions for practical reproducible research systems. The use of Matlab-based tools such as the famous Wavelab and Sparselab packages in promoting reproducible research in computational harmonic analysis has been presented. In particular, the authors point to the success of the reproducible research discipline in increasing the reliability of computational research and reflect on the effort necessary for implementing this discipline in a research group and overcoming possible objections to it. An article also describes a Python interface to the well-known Clawpack package for solving hyperbolic partial differential equations that appear in wave propagation problems. The author argues strongly in favor of reproducible computations and shows an example using a simplified Python interface to Fortran code. An article also represents the field of bioinformatics, which has been a stronghold of reproducible research. It describes the cacher package, which is built on top of the R computing environment. Cacher enables a modular approach to reproducible computations by storing results of intermediate computations in a database. The special issue ends with an article on the legal aspects of reproducible research, including copyright and licensing issues.