Home
Outcomes of computational approaches are occasionally often difficult to reproduce despite ongoing (open science) initiatives that resulted in guidelines and best practices to improve reproducibility. However, their translation and application in practice still is an obstacle. We propose ENCORE (ENhancing COmputational REproducilbity) to improve reproducibility and transparency through integration of all project components (e.g., data, code, results, concepts, documentation) in a standardized file system structure. The approach makes use of pre-defined (template) files to guide documentation, a GitHub repository for software versioning, a HTML-based navigator, and ENCORE user documentation.
ENCORE is agnostic to the type of computational project, data, programming language, and ICT infrastructure and does not depend on any software tool. ENCORE improved reproducibility and transparency of computational projects in our group.
Perhaps the most significant challenge to overcome for routine usage of initiatives such as ENCORE is the lack of incentives to sufficiently motivate researchers to spend sufficient time and effort on reproducibility. We expect ENCORE to contribute to the further development of approaches increasing transparency and reproducibility of computational research.
