ReScience C

ReScience C
Title	ReScience C
Discipline	Computational science

ReScience C ReScience C is an open scholarly journal focusing on the replication and reproducibility of computational research. It emphasizes reproducible implementations, peer review of code, and transparent archival practices, engaging with communities such as Linux Foundation, GitHub, Zenodo, European Organization for Nuclear Research, and OpenAIRE. The journal intersects with initiatives from National Science Foundation, European Research Council, Wellcome Trust, Mozilla Foundation, and Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.

Overview

ReScience C publishes articles that reimplement, validate, or extend computational results originally reported by researchers associated with institutions like Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and Princeton University. Articles link executable code, container images from registries used by Docker, Inc., and archival records in repositories such as Software Heritage, Figshare, and Dryad. Review processes borrow methods from platforms like arXiv and practices advocated by organizations including Committee on Publication Ethics and Center for Open Science. Editorial workflows reference metadata standards promoted by DataCite, persistent identifiers like Digital Object Identifier, and licensing models used by Creative Commons.

History and Development

The journal emerged amid reproducibility debates involving reports from National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, policy actions by European Commission, and studies from groups at Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley. Early coordination drew on projects at Inria, ETH Zurich, Max Planck Society, and initiatives such as Reproducibility Project: Psychology and reproducible-builds. Founders engaged with conferences including International Conference on Software Engineering, NeurIPS, International Conference on Computational Science, and meetings of Association for Computing Machinery. Over time, the project incorporated tooling and guidelines from The Carpentries, Jupyter Project, RStudio, and metadata frameworks championed by Research Data Alliance.

Publication Model and Workflow

Submissions provide source code and executable artifacts hosted on platforms like GitHub, containerized using Docker, Inc., or packaged via Conda. The peer review combines code review techniques from OpenAI-adjacent practices, continuous integration patterns popularized by Travis CI and CircleCI, and archival deposition workflows using Zenodo or Figshare. Editors coordinate reviews through collaboration tools such as GitHub issues and pull requests, and use citation norms influenced by CrossRef and indexing considerations by Scopus and Web of Science. Licensing often adopts Creative Commons or permissive software licenses favored by Free Software Foundation principles. Acceptance results in DOI assignment and archival deposits linked to identifiers from DataCite.

Scope and Notable Contributions

The journal covers replications across computational domains represented by labs at CERN, NASA, European Space Agency, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Notable contributions reimplemented algorithms from influential works associated with researchers at Google Research, DeepMind, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, and teams behind widely cited studies in venues like Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Communications of the ACM, and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. Case studies included reproducible renditions of results connected to projects from Human Genome Project, simulations comparable to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and machine learning experiments echoing publications at NeurIPS and ICML.

Community and Governance

Governance draws from models used by scholarly societies such as Association for Computing Machinery, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Royal Society, and consortia including Open Science Framework stakeholders. Editorial boards have included contributors affiliated with Inria, ETH Zurich, University of Edinburgh, University of Toronto, and research groups at Columbia University. Community engagement happens via workshops at conferences like SciPy, EuroSciPy, Force11, OpenCon, and hackathons organized with partners such as Mozilla Foundation and The Carpentries. Policies reference ethical guidelines from Committee on Publication Ethics and data stewardship frameworks promoted by Research Data Alliance.

Reception and Impact

Reactions to the journal involved commentary from editorial boards at Nature, Science, and policy units within European Commission and National Science Foundation. Advocates from Center for Open Science and leaders at Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition highlighted its role in encouraging reproducible computational scholarship, while some critics from traditional publishing circles such as Elsevier and Springer Nature questioned scalability. The journal influenced reproducibility policies at universities including University of California, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and funding agencies like Wellcome Trust and European Research Council, prompting changes in evaluation practices at institutes like Howard Hughes Medical Institute and national labs such as Argonne National Laboratory.

Category:Open access journals