Campaign proposal: Open Code Pledge

[rmib200]

• Campaign co-creator/s: Manuel Illanes @rmib200

• Rationale: Many areas of Neuroscience are critically dependent on computational tools for things like analysis of large volumes of data, tasks, visualization, etc. Right now, we can say that sharing code is the exception when new research is published. Only certain journals require papers to include a statement on whether programs are available. We belive that all jounals should adopt policies that strongly encourage or mandate the sharing of code. Sharing all code and data needed to allow others to reproduce our work should be considered a regular practice. At least the key parts when this is not possible or practical.

• Action: (1) Whenever you publish an article, also publish the code you used for the analysis and implementation via an open, freely available platform (e.g., Github, OSF, papers with code). (2) Generate a DOI for the code and link to this DOI in the article. (Optional)
  * Make sure that at least one or more figures from the manuscript are reproducible.
  * If you think the work is too computationally intensive, one small "toy" example could be used to demostrate it.
  * Also, you can upload a config file when possible.
  We can demonstrate, leading by example, the obvious benefits of adopting these practices like more transparency, reliability and faster adoption of new methods. This will improve the future work produced on Neuroscience, even if the code doesn't fully work in 20 years. Because it will still be more precise and complete than text in a paper.
  Open-source code can be used for promotion, reference letters, and mentions. Take into account that right now, the limitation is cultural rather than technical so let's take a part in changing that. Let's free our knowledge.

If you can provide feedback on anything that could be done differently to benefit the field or get more people motivated to do anything regarding science, please don't doubt to comment. For Example, we could start by listing all the possible best practices for this.

• Eligibility criteria: All fields (but we will target neuroscience researchers initially).

• Optional anonymity: Yes.

• Threshold: ~~100~~ 500 (calculated separately for each field)

• Pledge duration: ~~18 months.~~ Lifetime