RSEConUK 2019

With Substance and Stencila, eLife has been developing the Reproducible Document Stack (RDS), an open technology stack that will enable researchers to publish reproducible manuscripts. Its motivation came from recognising one of the key problems with the current established format of research articles: research methods are not generally described in sufficient detail to allow other researchers to faithfully repeat key experiments. This is in part due to the increasing complexity of modern research, in particular in its computational methods.

In this walkthrough, I will demonstrate how a researcher can create a reproducible article with Stencila Desktop, an open-source, easy-to-use manuscript editor with combines the traditional authoring workflows with R and Python code blocks that can analyse table data and generate live interactive plots. The reproducible article can be viewed, edited and executed from within a web browser; plots can be updated live by re-running the embedded code. I will discuss the underlying technologies of the article, and our future plans to develop RDS into a scalable, production-ready solution. We invite feedback from the community on the project’s potential functionalities and development roadmap.