I gave a seminar at the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon on Friday, September 14, at the invitation of Mohammad Akhlaghi, a post-doc there. Mohammad is very interested and has done a lot of work on reproducibility, ensuring that his work is reproducible and developing a reproducibility framework that can be adopted by others. The seminar took place on CRAL’s lovely historic campus at the Observatoire de Lyon in Saint-Genis-Laval. The title, abstract, and link to the slides are below.

Title: Make your code famous! (or at least discoverable).

Abstract: Source codes are increasingly important for the advancement of science in general and astrophysics in particular. Journal articles detail the general logic behind new results and ideas, but often the source codes that enable these results remain hidden from public view. In this presentation, I will discuss our recent study on the availability of source codes used for published research and how this affects the transparency and reproducibility of astro research. I will cover what the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL, ascl.net) is, how to submit software to the resource, and the benefits of doing so. I will share what happens after software is submitted, how ASCL entries are indexed by ADS, the links between literature and software entries, and how an ASCL ID can be used for citing your code. I will cover good and bad ways to cite software, avenues for publishing software, and how journals are changing to include and recognize the contribution software makes to our discipline.

Slides (PDF)