Fueling Research Transparency: Computational Notebooks and the Discussion Section

Abstract

The results of academic research, often publicly funded, should be easily available for a wide audience that includes fellow researchers, policy makers, journalists and anyone who takes an interest. On top of this, the research itself should be done in a transparent way so that results can be reproduced or perhaps falsified, as transparent research is good practice across all academic disciplines. Arguably, however, it is even more central in fields such as Regional Science with salient and tangible implications for local, regional, national and international socioeconomic policies. The advent of internet and the growing capacity of computers has increased both the possibilities and the societal demand for transparent science. Accommodating transparent research in Regional Science is a cornerstone of REGION. By its very nature as an online and open access journal, the contributions are made available to everyone. As it does not charge any submission fees, the journal is inclusive and invites contributions from across the globe. Also, in the longstanding and successful Resources section, REGION aims to unlock available datasets, visualization techniques and empirical approaches for a large audience. We are now proud to present two new types of publication that further accommodate transparent research in Regional Science: The Discussion section, and Computational Notebooks (see Figure 1). The Discussion section aims to accommodate contributions that reflect on Regional Science as a field of science. Such reflections can pertain to fields of study within regional science, research agendas, but also to the organization of the field including the position of young scientists, gender representation and geographical inclusiveness of Regional Science. We invite contributions that put forward ideas for the further development of the field, but also retrospective accounts are very welcome. This issue has the first item in the Discussion section, which puts forward a research agenda on Transport research that emanates from the NECTAR network (Geurs, Macharis 2019). Computational notebooks aim to augment the replicability, reproducibility and reach of research in Regional Science. Computational notebooks allow one to present analyses and integrate code, specialised software, dependencies, results and descriptive text into a single 'computational narrative' to be shared, read and executed by others. The interactive and narrative nature of computational notebooks provides unique opportunities for sharing computational research, enabling reproducibility in published scientific research. This is particularly important at a time of increased complexity of scientific studies. Computational notebooks are also valuable vehicles for teaching and demonstration of analytical tools. They can augment the impact of research beyond its primary academic objectives by extending original analysis and by reaching non-academic communities interested in Regional Science. The interactivity of notebooks can engage policy makers and the general pub...

A Major Uplift

“…The developments described above adds to those reported in Koster, Rowe (2020). We are convinced that these enhancements will contribute to the long-term vision of increasing the visibility and quality submissions to REGION.…”

Open data products-A framework for creating valuable analysis ready data

“…An open approach requires that the code generating the final dataset from the initial one(s) is available in both machine and human readable form. An increasingly popular format to meet this requirement within scientific communities is the computational notebook, such as Jupyter notebooks (Rule et al 2019 ) or Rmarkdown notebooks (Casado-Díaz et al 2017 ; Koster and Rowe 2019 ). In cases where commercial interest and copyright law prevents code sharing, so-called pseudo code with enough detail to reproduce the steps can be an acceptable compromise.…”

“…Rowe et al 2017 ), all elements hard to cover on a traditional research paper. Journals, such as REGION, have also started publishing computational notebooks, and a key aim is their added value in communicating and disseminating ODPs (Koster and Rowe 2019 ). Notebooks offer interactivity with the potential to engage policy, discipline-specific or local knowledge experts with data analysis exploration (Rowe et al 2020 ).…”

GIS and Computational Notebooks

“…Recent scandals regarding a lack of transparency and reproducibility have generated attention across the scientific world. In response, reform efforts have coalesced around the notion of open science-which promotes transparent, well-documented, and publicly disseminated research-so third parties can fully understand and replicate the workflows (Boeing, 2020a;Koster and Rowe, 2020;Wilson et al, 2020;Poorthuis and Zook, 2019;Rey, 2009).…”