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Moving toward fully transparent research publications, we suggest several approaches to share research that is instantiated in software written for computers and other laboratory machines. Review, replication, reuse and recognition are all incentives to provide code.
The assertions in a scientific article that invite testing can be specifically tagged for peer reviewers to evaluate relative to the experimental evidence offered. Isolated observations as well as theories that are not yet publishable can be tagged and immediately released like free-floating bubbles. These can then be considered as useful negative results when popped by experiment or as publishable advances when corroborated by further evidence gathered during attempts at refutation.
Although federated cooperation is politically desirable, uniform data quality and standards are essential and should not be reinvented from scratch. The International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) will do well to start with the data standards of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the Pediatric Cancer Genome Consortium if it is to succeed in genomic analysis across cancer types.