Special Lecture

Toward Reproducible Computational Science: Reliability, Re-Use, and Readability

Wednesday, April 9, 2014
4:10 pm to 5:30 pm
Victoria Stodden

Toward Reproducible Computational Science: Reliability, Re-Use, and Readability

Toward Reproducible Computational Science: Reliability, Re-Use, and Readability (Victoria Stodden)

The dissemination of reproducible computational research — where the code and data that generated the results are made conveniently available — is now widely recognized as a transformative movement within the scientific community. It is attracting attention not only from researchers but also from librarians and repository managers, journal editorial boards, funding agencies and policy makers, and scientific software developers.

This talk motivates the rationale for this shift, and presents solutions I have been developing to facilitate reliable and re-usable computational research including: new empirical findings on changes to journal data and code publication policies; best practices for code and data release; the open source dissemination and access tool ResearchCompendia.org; and the "Reproducible Research Standard" for ensuring the distribution of legally usable data and code. Some of these results are described in the forthcoming co-edited books Implementing Reproducible Research and Privacy, Big Data, and the Public Good.

Victoria Stodden is assistant professor of statistics at Columbia University and serves as a member of the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI), and on Columbia University’s Senate Information Technologies Committee. She is one of the creators of SparseLab, a collaborative platform for reproducible computational research and has developed an award winning licensing structure to facilitate open and reproducible computational research, called the Reproducible Research Standard. She is currently working on the NSF-funded project “Policy Design for Reproducibility and Data Sharing in Computational Science.”

Victoria co-chaired a working group on Virtual Organizations for the NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on Grand Challenge Communities in 2010. She is a Science Commons fellow and a nominated member of the Sigma Xi scientific research society. She also serves on the advisory board for hackNY.org, and on the joint advisory committee for the NSF's EarthCube, the effort to build a geosciences-integrating cyberinfrastructure. She is an editorial board member for Open Research Computation and Open Network Biology. She completed her Ph.D. and law degrees at Stanford University.

Her Erdös Number is 3.

Last updated:

August 23, 2016