eLife has announced the launch of Executable Research Articles (ERAs), allowing authors to post a computationally reproducible version of their published paper in the open-access journal.
eLife invests in open-source technology innovation to improve online tools for sharing, using and interacting with new results. The organisation has been working on the concept of computationally reproducible papers since 2017, first in partnership with Substance and later with Stencila. The open-source suite of tools that started eLife as the Reproducible Document Stack is now live on eLife as ERA, delivering a web-native format for making published research more transparent, interactive and reproducible.
Authors with a published eLife paper can register their interest to enrich their work with the addition of live code blocks and computed outputs, such as statistical results, tables and graphs. The resulting new ERA publication will be presented as a complement to their original paper.
Readers can then inspect, modify and re-execute the code directly in their browser, enabling them to better understand how figures have been generated, change a plot from one format to another, alter the data range of a specific analysis, and more. Any changes made to the ERA will be limited to the reader’s browsing session and will not affect the published article, ensuring that anyone can experiment with the results safely. Readers can also download the ERA publication, with all the embedded code and data preserved, and use it as a basis for further study or derivative works.
eLife authors are already taking advantage of the new ERA, with articles published by Tim Errington, Director of Research at the Center for Open Science, US, and Matthew Nolan, Professor of Neural Circuits and Computation at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
More information about ERA, including FAQs for publishers, authors and developers, is available in latest blog post. Authors who are interested in composing an ERA complement to their published eLife article can register at https://crm.elifesciences.org/crm/ERA-InterestForm.
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