Programming in the Life Sciences #23: research output for the future

A random public domain
picture with 10 in it.

Ensuring that you and others can understand you research output five years from now requires effort. This is why scholars tend to keep lab notebooks. The computational age has perhaps made us a bit lazy here, but we still make an effort. A series of Ten Simple Rules articles outline some of the things to think about:

1. Goodman A, Pepe A, Blocker AW, Borgman CL, Cranmer K, Crosas M, et al. Ten Simple Rules for the Care and Feeding of Scientific Data. Bourne PE, editor. PLoS Computational Biology. 2014 Apr 24;10(4):e1003542.
2. List M, Ebert P, Albrecht F. Ten Simple Rules for Developing Usable Software in Computational Biology. Markel S, editor. PLOS Computational Biology. 2017 Jan 5;13(1):e1005265.
3. Perez-Riverol Y, Gatto L, Wang R, Sachsenberg T, Uszkoreit J, Leprevost F da V, et al. Ten Simple Rules for Taking Advantage of Git and GitHub. Markel S, editor. PLOS Computational Biology. 2016 Jul 14;12(7):e1004947.
4. Prlić A, Procter JB. Ten Simple Rules for the Open Development of Scientific Software. PLoS Computational Biology. 2012 Dec 6;8(12):e1002802.
5. Sandve GK, Nekrutenko A, Taylor J, Hovig E. Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Computational Research. Bourne PE, editor. PLoS Computational Biology. 2013 Oct 24;9(10):e1003285.

Regarding licensing, I can highly recommend reading this book:

1. Rosen L. Open Source Licensing [Internet]. 2004. Available from: https://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm

Regarding Git, I recommend these two resources:

1. Wiegley J. Git From the Bottom Up [Internet]. 2017. Available from: https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/
2. Task 1: How to set up a repository on GitHub [Internet]. 2018. Available from: https://github.com/OpenScienceMOOC/Module-5-Open-Research-Software-and-Open-Source/blob/master/content_development/Task_1.md