The folks at mloss.org — Machine Leaning Open Source Software — invited a blog post on my roundtable on data and code sharing, held at Yale Law School last November. mloss.org’s philosophy is stated as:
“Open source tools have recently reached a level of maturity which makes them suitable for building large-scale real-world systems. At the same time, the field of machine learning has developed a large body of powerful learning algorithms for a wide range of applications. Inspired by similar efforts in bioinformatics (BOSC) or statistics (useR), our aim is to build a forum for open source software in machine learning.”
The site is excellent and worth a visit. The guest blog Chris Wiggins and I wrote starts:
“As pointed out by the authors of the mloss position paper [1] in 2007, “reproducibility of experimental results is a cornerstone of science.” Just as in machine learning, researchers in many computational fields (or in which computation has only recently played a major role) are struggling to reconcile our expectation of reproducibility in science with the reality of ever-growing computational complexity and opacity. [2-12]
In an effort to address these questions from researchers not only from statistical science but from a variety of disciplines, and to discuss possible solutions with representatives from publishing, funding, and legal scholars expert in appropriate licensing for open access, Yale Information Society Project Fellow Victoria Stodden convened a roundtable on the topic on November 21, 2009. Attendees included statistical scientists such as Robert Gentleman (co-developer of R) and David Donoho, among others.”
keep reading at http://mloss.org/community/blog/2010/jan/26/data-and-code-sharing-roundtable/. We made an effort to reference efforts in other fields regarding reproducibility in computational science.