February 18, 2010 Celebration No comments
A new stable release of madagascar is another step toward the first non-beta version (madagascar-1.0) anticipated to be released later this year. This release features new reproducible papers and many other improvements. One new feature is the nonseismic package, which contains a subset of the full package for people who do not work with seismic data. The cumulative number of downloads for all stable versions has reached 8,000.
February 14, 2010 Links No comments
A article published in Guardian argues for software openness in science.
.…if you are publishing research articles that use computer programs, if you want to claim that you are engaging in science, the programs are in your possession and you will not release them then I would not regard you as a scientist; I would also regard any papers based on the software as null and void.
For an emprical survey on why scientists do and do not share their software, see The Scientific Method in Practice: Reproducibility in the Computational Sciences by Victoria Stodden.