The Reproducible Research Guilt Trip May Finally Be Paying Off
We might be closer to killing off the "Just take my word for it - I'm pretty sure I did this right" methods section There is no shortage of well-reasoned articles filled persuasive arguments about the need for higher reproducible research standards in the scientific literature. With so many good posts about the virtues of reproducible research, they all boil down to one overarching concept: Why is this even an issue? Biologists in particular seem to be collectively and subconsciously reacting to those awful General Chemistry labs where they had you copy down pages of instructions verbatim into your lab notebook. It should come as no surprise that bioinformatics is ground zero for reproducibility activism. It is unfortunate reproducible research is tied up with all sorts of other holier-than-thou practices: open access, open source, open data, literate programming, blogging, functional programming. This all-encompassing evangelism tends to polarize people. Wh
