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Science’s Reproducibility Crisis: How FOSS Hackers Can Help
Quoting: Science’s Reproducibility Crisis: How FOSS Hackers Can Help - FOSS Force —
Is open source literacy really as scarce in science as the article illustrates, and if so, how can we fix that? To find answers I reached out to Stefano Zacchiroli, a former Debian project leader and co-founder of Software Heritage, the international nonprofit that works with UNESCO to collect, preserve, and share publicly available software source code.
The first thing Zacchiroli pointed out is that these days all our society needs software reproducibility, not just programmers, because practically all advances in science and industry happen through software. In a saner world, reproducibility would be a mandatory component of the supply chain of every product that is or includes software.
As far as science is concerned, he said, this means that researchers must publish and preserve all the software they use in ways that really allow others to run it exactly as they did.
Unfortunately, according to Zacchiroli, very few people (including many FOSS developers) understand that project repositories on platforms like Github cannot be a solution. Links to such pages add little or nothing to reproducibility, even when they do specify which version of that software was used — which seldom happens in scientific papers. The problem, of course, is that not only can entire projects vanish from a repository at any moment, but even the software commits being hosted may change or disappear by the time someone needs to study or recompile them.