Version control for science
by Karthik Ram. Average Reading Time: less than a minute.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of version control in science of late. This is not just because of my involvement with multiple collaborative efforts that would be a nightmare to move forward without a structured workflow. I fortuitously got involved in a collaboration between GitHub, BiomedCentral, and a handful of bioinformatics scientists to explore the importance of version control in a scholarly communication context.
I’m happy to announce that the first outcome of the project, a paper (open access) outlining various use-cases for Git in science just went in press today. Here is the official announcement from BMC and also a blog post that I co-wrote with C. Titus Brown.
Ram, K. (2013). git can facilitate greater reproducibility and increased transparency in science. Source Code Biol Med, 8, 7.
[…] just came across this presentation shared by Karthik Ram on Twitter (see also http://inundata.org/2013/02/28/version-control-for-science/). It describes a project that tries to create a sort of git for data. It seems to be at a very […]
Hi Karthik,
I’ve been browsing your blog post, rOpenSci and SCFBM article. Very nice work! I’ve been thinking about parallels between research and software development workflows and project management, and getting up to speed on GitHub. From details (e.g. moving away from Word for collaborative writing) to the more philosophical (e.g. promoting a culture of brainstorming and iteration in research), I’d love to participating in the discussion.
Hi Karthik,
I’ve been browsing your blog post, rOpenSci and SCFBM article. Very nice work! I’ve been thinking about parallels between research and software development workflows and project management, and getting up to speed on GitHub. From details (e.g. moving away from Word for collaborative writing) to the more philosophical (e.g. promoting a culture of brainstorming and iteration in research), I’d love to participate in the discussion.