The American Statistical Society is one of many organizations taking action to preserve scientific research by ensuring reproducibility. To do this, the Society will require authors who publish papers in the Applications and Case Studies section of the Journal of the American Statistical Society (JASA) to provide code and data to the journal.
iSchool Associate Professor Victoria Stodden has been selected to serve as one of three new associate editors for reproducibility for JASA. These editors will develop standards for reproducibility, and will review code and data submitted by authors whose papers have been accepted to ensure those standards are met. This information will then be shared via the journal’s website.
“Our statistical profession has a responsibility to establish publication standards that improve the transparency and robustness of what we publish and to promote awareness within the scientific community of the need for rigor in our statistical research to ensure reproducibility of our scientific results. JASA is committed to helping lead the effort by presenting solutions that can help improve research quality and reproducibility,” said Montse Fuentes, coordinating editor, in a press release announcing the change.
Stodden is a leading figure in the area of reproducibility in computational science, exploring how we can better ensure the reliability and usefulness of scientific results in the face of increasingly sophisticated computational approaches to research. Her work addresses a wide range of topics, including standards of openness for data and code sharing, legal and policy barriers to disseminating reproducible research, robustness in replicated findings, cyberinfrastructure to enable reproducibility, and scientific publishing practices.
At Illinois, she holds affiliate appointments at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), College of Law, Department of Statistics, and Department of Computer Science. Stodden earned both her PhD in statistics and her law degree from Stanford University. She also holds a master’s degree in economics from the University of British Columbia and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Ottawa.