Good practice in research coding: What are the targets and how do we get there…?

"Nick Barnes of the Climate Code Foundation developed the Science Code Manifesto, a statement of how things ought to be (I was very happy to contribute and be a founding signatory) and while for many this may not go far enough (it doesn’t explicitly require open source licensing) it is intended as a practical set of steps that might be adopted by communities today. This has already garnered hundreds of endorsers and I’d encourage you to sign up if you want to show your support. The Science Code Manifesto builds on work over many years of Victoria Stodden in identifying the key issues and bringing them to wider awareness with both researchers and funders as well as the work of John Cook, Jon Claerbout, and Patrick Vanderwalle at ReproducibleResearch.net. If the manifesto and the others work are actions that aim (broadly) to set out the principles and to understand where we need to go then Open Research Computation is intended as a practical step embedded in today’s practice. Researchers need the credit provided by conventional papers, so if we can link papers in a journal that garners significant prestige, with high standards in the design and application of the software that is described we can link the existing incentives to our desired practice. This is a high wire act. How far do we push those standards out in front of where most of the community is. We explicitly want ORC to be a high profile journal featuring high quality software, for acceptance to be a mark of quality that the community will respect. At the same time we can’t ask for the impossible. If we set standards so high that no-one can meet them then we won’t have any papers. And with no papers we can’t start the process of changing practice. Equally, allow too much in and we won’t create a journal with a buzz about it. That quality mark has to be respected as meaning something by the community. I’ll be blunt. We haven’t had the number of submissions I’d hoped for...."