ReScience: A Scientific Journal Living on Github

Computation research is set to get new open source journal solely for publishing implementations of algorithms and codes already published. Termed ReScience (Replicated Science – I guess), the journal uses and exists solely on Github, a popular Web-based Git repository service, offering all of the distributed revision control and source code management functionality of Git.

The submitted papers are peer-reviewed and papers are encourages which explicitly replicate already published research. This promotes open-source implementations alongside ensuring that the originally published research is replicable. Submissions are also unlike any other journal with a submitter required to submit a pull request from his public repository. When inquired about what happens if and when the submitter chooses to delete his original repository, Nicholas P, founder of ReScience said that “we clone the repository into ReScience archives at the time of publication and the associated DOI has also a zip archive of the whole repo”. 

The first issue of ReScience is available now with one paper titled, “[Re] Interaction between cognitive and motor cortico-basal ganglia loops during decision making: a computational study, M. Topalidou and N.P. Rougier, ReScience, volume 1, issue 1, 2015″. The parts of the paper include the PDF with the conventional paper, the code repository, peer reviews and a Digital Object Identifier tag for easy referencing.

Using Github’s features of version control and forking, ReScience has found the easiest way of publishing research papers. Since its meant for computational research, it makes sense to use Github’s code repository features. Researchers familiar with Github can signup to become reviewers on the site.

Source: ReScience Github