Reproducible Document Stack: towards a scalable solution for reproducible articles | Labs | eLife

"In February, eLife introduced its first computationally reproducible document, based on a research article originally published in the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology by Tim Errington, the Director of Research at the Center for Open Science. The interactive article is a demonstration of some of the capabilities of the initial prototype of the Reproducible Document Stack (RDS), an open-source tool stack for authoring and publishing reproducible articles developed by Substance and building on technology from Stencila and Binder. The demo also showcased eLife’s vision for the future of research articles. The research community’s response to the article was overwhelmingly encouraging: thousands of researchers explored the paper’s in-line code block re-execution abilities by manipulating its plots, and several authors approached us directly to ask how they might publish a reproducible version of their own manuscripts.... Encouraged by the community interest and feedback, we have now started working on achieving a scalable implementation and service infrastructure to support the publication of reproducible articles. The goal of this next phase in the RDS project is to ship researcher-centred open-source solutions that will allow for the hosting and publication of reproducible documents, at scale, by anyone. This includes building conversion, rendering and authoring tools, and the backend infrastructure needed to execute reproducible articles in the browser. Interoperability, modularity and openness are at the heart of the RDS’s design and development. We want authors, readers and publishers from different research communities to be able to use and interact with these tools seamlessly. RDS will continue to be developed open-source, and we strive to update and engage the community at all stages of development. Our first priority will be enabling interoperability with existing authoring tools for the Jupyter and R Markdown communities...."