What if there were an open-access peer-reviewed journal where neither the authors nor the readers have to pay to publish or read. Instead, it is maintained by its community. In addition, the whole publishing process is public, everyone can see it, and even comment or participate. Wouldn’t that be cool?
Well, there is such a journal, and it’s called ReScience C. On their own words
ReScience C is a platinum open-access peer-reviewed journal that targets computational research and encourages the explicit replication of already published research, promoting new and open-source implementations in order to ensure that the original research is reproducible.
Basically, if during your research you are trying to replicate other researchers’ work, and succeed in doing so (or not), you can publish these findings of yours in the ReScience C journal.
Why is it useful at all to publish (open-source) replications of a work already published? Well, if you are making this question, you probably are not quite involved into science, and you have never been assigned to reproduce what others did in a scientific publication. It’s hard in most cases (let’s leave it like that). 1 2 3
By replicating an already existent work, which is a task students make all the time, and sharing your experience, you are in fact making yourself a scientific publication, and at the same time:
- Validating or rejecting what others have find, that is, confirming it’s reproducibility.
- And making available a working source code and documentation, which should have been with the original paper in the first place, but weren’t. And that has a huge value.
Clear drawbacks are the additional effort any peer-reviewed publication needs, and the social/professional risk in publishing articles that show results from a senior researcher to be wrong. The last one being recognized even by the authors. 1
Although this is not a compelling option for everyone, it’s nonetheless interesting for others who do like to add a little more of effort into their career. And although this journal has a very narrow niche, it’s a great initiative which has proven viable for the Open Access and reproducible science we all want.
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