Rule rewrite aims to clean up scientific software : Nature News & Comment

"The finding seemed counterintuitive: warming in North America was driving plant species to lower elevations — not towards higher, cooler climes, as ecologists had long predicted. But the research published in Global Change Biology indeed turned out to be wrong. In February, the journal retracted the paper after its intriguing conclusion was found to be the result of errant software code1. Worried about a rising tide of results that fail to measure up, journals are starting to take action. In the latest such move, Nature Biotechnology announced on 7 April a plan to prevent such embarrassing episodes in its pages (Nature Biotechnol. 33, 319; 2015). Its peer reviewers will now be asked to assess the availability of documentation and algorithms used in computational analyses, not just the description of the work. The journal is also exploring whether peer reviewers can test complex code using services such as Docker, a piece of software that allows study authors to create a shareable representation of their computing environment. Researchers say that such measures are badly needed ..."