Code Is Science

Premise

Science is often computing: Much of modern science involves code these days, in large part due to the amount of data available - it would be almost impossible to analyse without computational assistance.

Science requires peer review: One of the basic prerequisites for any published scientific results is that it be reviewed by peers, to ensure the research and conclusions are valid.

Software contains errors: We may try pretty hard to write software without bugs, but they definitely still happen - and errors can be hard to spot. The bug doesn’t have to cause catastrophic and obvious failure - it could be silent but sneaky.

Code == Science

If software is required to perform science, it stands to reason that errors in your software mean errors in your science.

Possible Solution?

Scientific code needs to be peer reviewed, and ideally open source.

That’s easier said than done. Getting there requires awareness, culture shift, and adherence to best practices.

Code is Science Manifesto

Through working with scientific code, we agree that scientific code needs to be treated as a genuine research output. For this reason we have created a manifesto, which will allow both individuals and organisations to sign up and agree to make genuine efforts to both make their own scientific code open, as well as sharing the manifesto mission with others.