This week Associate Professor Victoria Stodden delivered the opening plenary address of the spring membership meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). The event was held April 4-5 in San Antonio, Texas.
CNI members—including more than two hundred institutions from education, publishing, industry, and the nonprofit sector—are “dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of digital information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.”
In her talk, “Defining the Scholarly Record for Computational Research,” Stodden addressed reproducibility of published findings in multiple disciplines.
From the abstract: In this talk I will present a way of unpacking the notion of reproducibility into three types: empirical, statistical, and computational, which frames the scope and sources of the problem. Resolving reproducibility involves engaging an interlocking set of stakeholders, including institutions, libraries, scholarly societies, funding agencies, publishers, and the researchers themselves, creating a complex collective action problem. I will present advances that take these stakeholder roles into account, including empirical results on data and code publication policies by journals; the pilot project http://ResearchCompendia.org, for understanding the role of data and code access in resolving reproducibility; and the “Reproducible Research Standard,” for ensuring the distribution of legally reusable data and code.
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.