Toward Long-Term and Archivable Reproducibility (original) (raw)

2022, Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)

Analysis pipelines commonly use high-level technologies that are popular when created, but are unlikely to be readable, executable, or sustainable in the long term. A set of criteria is introduced to address this problem: Completeness (no execution requirement beyond a minimal Unix-like operating system, no administrator privileges, no network connection, and storage primarily in plain text); modular design; minimal complexity; scalability; verifiable inputs and outputs; version control; linking analysis with narrative; and free and open source software. As a proof of concept, we introduce "Maneage" (Managing data lineage), enabling cheap archiving, provenance extraction, and peer verification that has been tested in several research publications. We show that longevity is a realistic requirement that does not sacrifice immediate or short-term reproducibility. The caveats (with proposed solutions) are then discussed and we conclude with the benefits for the various stakeholders. This article is itself a Maneage'd project (project commit 54e4eb2). Appendices-Two comprehensive appendices that review the longevity of existing solutions; available after the main body of this paper (Appendices A and B). Reproducibility-Products available in zenodo.6533902. Git history of this paper is at git.maneage.org/paper-concept.git, which is also archived in Software Heritage 1 .

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