Nature on reproducible research

I imagine that most people, when asked “do you think that independent confirmation of research findings is important?” would answer “yes”. I also imagine, when told that in most cases this is not possible, that those people might be concerned or perhaps incredulous. However, this really is the case, which is why I spend much of my working life in a state of concern and incredulity.

Over the years, many articles have been written on how to improve this state of affairs by adopting best practices, collectively-termed reproducible research. One of the latest is an editorial in Nature. I’ve pulled out a few quotes for discussion.

From the “blogosphere”? Hardly.

I generally skip over “From the Blogosphere”, a (mostly) weekly-summary of one or two blog posts in Nature’s “Authors” section (here is the latest). Why? Well, I’ve always suspected that the title is rather misleading. Now, I have the hard numbers to prove it.

Science in the petabyte era

Just a brief note: the title of this post is taken from the cover of today’s Nature. It contains several very good feature articles on the challenges of dealing with peta- (and more) byte size datasets, grouped under the heading “Big data”.

Nature contents Sep 4 2008.
Nature News Big Data special.

By far the best of the articles is The future of biocuration: it offers practical recommendations, as opposed to the “gee whizz, what a lot of data” approach. Not least of which: “curators, researchers, academic institutions and funding agencies should, in the next ten years, increase the visibility and support of scientific curation as a professional career.”
Almost as good are Wikiomics, which tackles the lack of participation issue and Welcome to the petacentre, in which Boing-Boing’s Cory Doctorow explores, amongst other places, the Sanger Institute data centre.

So far as I can tell from the Nature News link, these articles are freely-available.

A brief history of the platypus, in 5 parts

Who isn’t fascinated by the strangest of mammals, the platypus? It has fur and lactates, like a mammal. It has a bill and webbed feet, like a bird. It lays eggs and produces venom, like a reptile. It finds prey using electroreception, like sharks. The platypus is so weird that when first described, many scientists assumed that it was a hoax.

To celebrate the publication of the draft platypus genome, here’s a brief guide to this wondrous creature.

Nature old and new

• Complete Nature archive 1869-present now online
• Euan lets slip that a Nature Network API is in the works. Can’t wait.