By Steve Crouch, Consultancy Leader.

Reproducibility - the ability for people other than the original researcher to reproduce a scientific result - is a cornerstone of science (it is also the theme of this year's Collaboration Workshop). A collaboration between the Software Sustainability Institute and recomputation.org will make it easy to submit recomputable experiments to a public repository and for other researchers to reproduce them.

Recomputation.org allows the reproduction of scientific results generated using software. The software is packaged with all its dependencies as a virtual machine, which is hosted on the Recomputation.org site so that others can download it and reproduce the original experiment. "Recomputing past experiments is really important to securing reproducibility in Computer Science" said Ian Gent, creator of recomputation.org "not only that, it means new researchers can look inside machines and borrow from the experimental techniques of predecessors. So we can not only recompute past experiments but make new ones better."

The recomputation manifesto created quite an impact when it was published last year. Written by Ian, it attracted over 10,000 viewers from across the world and caused a huge discussion to take place on social media. The manifesto states that computational experiments should be recomputable for all time, that the virtual machine is the correct mechanism for making experiments recomputable, and that the whole process must be very easy. An easy process requires the preparation and submission of experiments to recomputation.org to be straightforward - and this is what led Ian to collaborate with the Institute.

Our collaboration will also help recomputation.org extend its capability by allowing others to run submitted experiments on the Cloud. This will initially make use of Microsoft Azure, thanks to a competition that recomputation.org successfully applied for, but the infrastructure will be capable of using other Cloud platforms as well. "It's very exciting to be able to find such great people and organisations willing to help us on recomputation. As well as donations of cloud time from Microsoft, I'm particularly pleased by the support from the Institute because of our common interest in helping researchers make their work reproducible for the long term," said Ian.