The council of the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe (AGILE) provides funding to support a new AGILE initiative. Reproducible Publications at AGILE Conferences" will develop protocols for publishing reproducible research in AGILE conference publications. The aim is to support and improve the way we describe our science and to enhance the usefulness of AGILE conference publications to the wider community. The potential benefits of this include greater research transparency, enhanced citations of published articles and increased relevance of the conference in the field. The funding will support a workshop attended by domain experts to develop author and reviewer guidelines that will be presented at the AGILE 2019 conference. The initiative members are Daniel Nüst (Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster, Münster, Germany), Frank Ostermann (Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands), Rusne Sileryte (Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands), Carlos Granell (Institute of New Imaging Technologies, Universitat Jaume I de Castellón, Castellón, Spain), and Barbara Hofer (Interfaculty Department of Geoinformatics - Z_GIS, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria)."

Reproducibility is an important concern in all areas of computation. As such, computational reproducibility is receiving increasing interest from a variety of parties who are concerned with different aspects of computational reproducibility. Computational reproducibility encompasses several concerns including the sharing of code and data, as well as reproducible numerical results which may depend on operating system, tools, levels of parallelism, and numerical effects. In addition, the publication of reproducible computational results motivates a host of computational reproducibility concerns that arise from the fundamental notion of reproducibility of scientific results that has normally been restricted to experimental science. This workshop combines the Numerical Reproducibility at Exascale Workshops (conducted in 2015 and 2016 at SC) and the panel on Reproducibility held at SC16 (originally a BOF at SC15) to address several different issues in reproducibility that arise when computing at exascale. The workshop will include issues of numerical reproducibility as well as approaches and best practices to sharing and running code.

Reproducibility: Submitted papers will be assessed based on their novelty, technical quality, potential impact, insightfulness, depth, clarity, and reproducibility. Authors are strongly encouraged to make their code and data publicly available whenever possible. Algorithms and resources used in a paper should be described as completely as possible to allow reproducibility. This includes experimental methodology, empirical evaluations, and results. The reproducibility factor will play an important role in the assessment of each submission.

One of the most valuable talks of the day for me was from Fernando Chirigati from New York University. He introduced us to a useful new tool called ReproZip. He made the point that the computational environment is as important as the data itself for the reproducibility of research data. This could include information about libraries used, environment variables and options. You can not expect your depositors to find or document all of the dependencies (or your future users to install them). What ReproZip does is package up all the necessary dependencies along with the data itself. This package can then be archived and re-used in the future. ReproZip can also be used to unpack and re-use the data in the future. I can see a very real use case for this for researchers within our institution.

Columbia University and other New York City research institutions, including NYU, are hosting a one-day symposium on December 9, 2016 to showcase a robust discussion of reproducibility and research integrity among leading experts, high-profile journal editors, funders and researchers. This program will reveal the "inside story" of how issues are handled by institutions, journals and federal agencies and offer strategies for responding to challenges in these areas. The stimulating and provacative program is for researchers at all stages of their careers.

Please join us for a free afternoon of clinical research transparency and reproducibility discussion and learning co-hosted by New York University, Center for Open Science, and AllTrials USA (part of Sense About Science USA).