Scientific publishing

The Scientist (June 12) -- Several recent analyses have suggested that large swaths of published work in some fields are irreproducible. One Illinois project dubbed “Whole Tale,” supported in part by a $5 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation, aims to overhaul the scientific publishing process. “It’s almost expected nowadays that when you publish the paper you link the paper to data,” said project co-organizer Matthew Turk, a research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). “Linking papers to code as well as data is becoming more common. Whole Tale will take that a step further and let other researchers to replicate the experience of doing the research but in their own way.”