Pioneering ‘live-code’ article allows scientists to play with each other’s results

"The online journal eLife has created its first “computationally reproducible” article, in which figures are integrated with the software, data and computational environment required to produce them.

Readers can change the underlying code and produce modified figures in order to better understand, validate or build on the work. For example, they could rerun the code to see what a figure looks like without outliers, or use a different type of plot to reveal trends more effectively.

Researchers say that the reproducible article, which eLife first published in its conventional format last year1, is a significant step towards a future in which papers are much more than just static pages...."