containerit packages R script/session/workspace and all dependencies as a Docker container by automagically generating a suitable Dockerfile. The package’s website is https://o2r.info/containerit/.

Reporting specific modelling methods and metadata is essential to the reproducibility of ecological studies, yet guidelines rarely exist regarding what information should be noted. Here, we address this issue for ecological niche modelling or species distribution modelling, a rapidly developing toolset in ecology used across many aspects of biodiversity science. Our quantitative review of the recent literature reveals a general lack of sufficient information to fully reproduce the work. Over two-thirds of the examined studies neglected to report the version or access date of the underlying data, and only half reported model parameters. To address this problem, we propose adopting a checklist to guide studies in reporting at least the minimum information necessary for ecological niche modelling reproducibility, offering a straightforward way to balance efficiency and accuracy. We encourage the ecological niche modelling community, as well as journal reviewers and editors, to utilize and further develop this framework to facilitate and improve the reproducibility of future work. The proposed checklist framework is generalizable to other areas of ecology, especially those utilizing biodiversity data, environmental data and statistical modelling, and could also be adopted by a broader array of disciplines.

The Reproducibility issue even if not a crisis, is still a major problem in the world of science and engineering. Within metrology, making measurements at the limits that science allows for, inevitably, factors not originally considered relevant can be very relevant. Who did the measurement? How exactly did they do it? Was a mistake made? Was the equipment working correctly? All these factors can influence the outputs from a measurement process. In this work we investigate the use of Semantic Web technologies as a strategic basis on which to capture provenance meta-data and the data curation processes that will lead to a better understanding of issues affecting reproducibility.

Reproducibility is a fundamental requirement of the scientific process since it enables outcomes to be replicated and verified. Computational scientific experiments can benefit from improved reproducibility for many reasons, including validation of results and reuse by other scientists. However, designing reproducible experiments remains a challenge and hence the need for developing methodologies and tools that can support this process. Here, we propose a conceptual model for reproducibility to specify its main attributes and properties, along with a framework that allows for computational experiments to be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. We present a case study in ecological niche modeling to demonstrate and evaluate the implementation of this framework.

Geoinformatics deals with spatial and temporal information and its analysis. Research in this field often follows established practices of first developing computational solutions for specific spatiotemporal problems and then publishing the results and insights in a (static) paper, e.g. as a PDF. Not every detail can be included in such a paper, and particularly, the complete set of computational steps are frequently left out. While this approach conveys key knowledge to other researchers it makes it difficult to effectively re-use and reproduce the reported results. In this vision paper, we propose an alternative approach to carry out and report research in Geoinformatics. It is based on (computational) reproducibility, promises to make re-use and reproduction more effective, and creates new opportunities for further research. We report on experiences with executable research compendia (ERCs) as alternatives to classic publications in Geoinformatics, and we discuss how ERCs combined with a supporting research infrastructure can transform how we do research in Geoinformatics. We point out which challenges this idea entails and what new research opportunities emerge, in particular for the COSIT community.

This data article introduces a reproducibility dataset with the aim of allowing the exact replication of all experiments, results and data tables introduced in our companion paper (Lastra-Díaz et al., 2019), which introduces the largest experimental survey on ontology-based semantic similarity methods and Word Embeddings (WE) for word similarity reported in the literature. The implementation of all our experiments, as well as the gathering of all raw data derived from them, was based on the software implementation and evaluation of all methods in HESML library (Lastra-Díaz et al., 2017), and their subsequent recording with Reprozip (Chirigati et al., 2016). Raw data is made up by a collection of data files gathering the raw word-similarity values returned by each method for each word pair evaluated in any benchmark. Raw data files was processed by running a R-language script with the aim of computing all evaluation metrics reported in (Lastra-Díaz et al., 2019), such as Pearson and Spearman correlation, harmonic score and statistical significance p-values, as well as to generate automatically all data tables shown in our companion paper. Our dataset provides all input data files, resources and complementary software tools to reproduce from scratch all our experimental data, statistical analysis and reported data. Finally, our reproducibility dataset provides a self-contained experimentation platform which allows to run new word similarity benchmarks by setting up new experiments including other unconsidered methods or word similarity benchmarks.