We See the Light - Source Code Should be Published

After thinking through various arguments for or against publishing source codes with NGS papers, we came to agree with Titus Brown. All objections raised by us appear more like exceptions and do not show up in case of

99% of NGS-related research reports. [That stat we threw in is purely off a hat…we cannot produce source code :)]

Let us explain why there should be no serious objection against publishing source codes. The rule of scientific reporting is to clearly express all steps so that anyone else can reproduce the experiment by reading the report. For computational ‘experiment’, those steps constitute of starting from raw reads and running various programs/scripts to get to the result. Ideally, the author is supposed to report every small parameter used in every step so that another person can properly reproduce the steps. So, by allowing an author to post source code, the community is telling him - ‘Ok, you can be a bit sloppy in your reporting in supplementary text, as long as you give us your jumbled up PERL/python scripts. We will help you fill up the holes.’ The community is giving the author an easy way out, and that is a bargain most authors should be able to accept. However, few stubborn authors may choose the more difficult option of full reporting of all parameters/steps, and we are ready to let them do so provided they do the job properly.

Exceptions - Should someone be dragged to expose his well-written C++ code? For example, let us say a lab develops an integrated code for a submitted paper and another ongoing ‘secret’ research project not expected to be published in another 6 months. Would not publishing source code compromise their intentions by giving heads up to the competitor? One can always come up with other reasons not to give codes away, but we suspect the primary excuse will be ‘competitive reason’. We believe the authors can always publish a replica code, as long as it goes from A (raw data) to Z (final results) in the same manner as described in text. The ‘replica’ rule should take care of all objections raised by us earlier.

Basically, the primary goal here is to let others reproduce the computational experiment. We are not after well-thought out class structures of various objects designed by the programmer. Therefore, a sloppily written PERL code implementing the same algorithm is good enough for the reporting task.

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On a related, but somewhat different matter, we recently found out that the authors of sea urchin RNAseq paper posted their raw reads in the SRA database. However, when we checked the reads, we found that they were all 162 nt single-ended Illumina reads, whereas the experiment got paired end. It took us few minutes to figure out that the authors joined the reads by using some other method, and submitted the joined reads.

That was very nice of the authors to help potential users skip one or more step in analysis, but joined reads are not raw reads coming out of machine and do not have the same statistical structure as raw reads.

At this point, we do not know whether to thank authors for thoughtfulness, or whether to be a PITA by asking for raw reads.