One of the gists of science is to form a hypothesis of a phenomenon and then test the hypothesis via predictions through experimental studies. When a scientist announces a discovery claiming her hypothesis was confirmed through the experimental studies, she has to provide documentation with all the data and methodology. This is the basis of the scientific method, enabling other scientists to scrutinize the discovery. If there was no expectation to share the documentation, data, and methodology, anyone could claim discoveries without being held accountable, and science would be a yet another joke.
In computer science, the data and methodology are stored in form of computer files, representing raw data and computer programs that perform computation on the data. That makes it easy, or at least it sounds easy, to share the documentation, data, and methodology with other scientists because sharing boils down to copying digital files. However, due to the complexity and rapid development of computer systems, it is not always clear if the documentation is complete and how to make the discovery reproducible 10 years down the road.
Even though it is not applicable in all forms of computer science research, computer scientists can share their experimental studies in the form of virtual machines, a software-based emulation of computers. A virtual machine encompasses the whole environment of the experimental studies, which enables other scientists to repeat the studies. Nonetheless, the availability of the virtual machines doesn’t necessarily make the studies reproducible; the machines themselves don’t document the steps taken to build them.
I would like to make my research easily repeatable and reproducible. In order to meet that goal, I want to provide the research community with both virtual machines with my experimental studies and with ways to rebuild the machines from scratch. I am still not there, but I am thinking of writing a piece of software that would pull a clean operating system installation image from the Internet, install the operating system, configure it, and install my experimental studies.
The good news is that there is already something like that out there, so probably the only thing I will need to do is to configure such software to do what I want it to do. In particular, I am talking about libvirt. It is a collection of tools for managing virtual machines. In other words, this would enable me to provide other scientists with a way to rebuild a virtual machine and as a result of it, I would also have the virtual machine itself ready to be shared.
The operating system I am planning to use for the virtual machines is Debian GNU/Linux. There are several reasons why Debian, and not some other GNU/Linux distribution or some other operating system. First of all, Debian is a free (as in freedom) operating system. The most trivial consequence of Debian being free software is that it is available free of charge, which means other scientists will be able to repeat and reproduce my research without having to pay for software licenses. Free software also means no strings attached — no artificial limitations nor user subjugation. Second of all, because source code availability is a prerequisite for free software, it means the whole environment of my experimental studies will be ready for careful scrutiny. Third, no other GNU/Linux distribution has such a strong and big community that provides archives for such a long time; all releases, including the first Debian 1.1 release, have been available since 1996. Fourth, Debian is another word for stability; there are so many aspects to Debian stability, including the availability of its archives, making it a perfect match for reproducible research.
Even if you haven’t worried too much so far about others being able to (easily) reproduce your research, you should still care about reproducible research if nothing else, then for yourself to be able to repeat and reproduce your own experimental studies in a month, in 5 years, and in 20 years too. Yes, it takes time to carefully document everything and often there are deadlines to be met, but this is not your last experimental study ever. Therefore, it is worthwhile to spend some time in figuring out how to make your research reproducible, and reap benefits from it in research projects to come.