Posted by Laila Puntel
Helen Shen’s article “Interactive notebooks: Sharing the code”
Considering that this article was published in a very high impact factor journal, like Nature, means that most likely a lot of scientists are currently thinking about dynamic documents as a very common way of publishing-sharing. The article goes around the fact that the free IPython notebook makes data analysis easier to record, understand and reproduce. Overall, this new way of communicating the research allows reader and other researches to reproduce of the entire document that will improve communication is science. Underline, this article is indirectly telling us to all people involved in science that we should start looking at dynamic documents as our new best friend because this is the future. The more journals with this high standards publishing this type of articles the fastest will be the adoption of all this tools. I think that is a very positive improvement for the entire science community that will allow us diverse improvements into a single project able to reach better new objectives out of the same project. I believe the significance of a journal such as Nature publishing an informative article like this one implies that the practice of using reproducible document format is becoming more widespread. The scientific community has obviously made it apparent to publishers, such as Nature, that programs based upon reproducibility and dynamic documents are probably the best option in the near future. Besides the concrete sign that we could take out of this published article, the process of adoption dynamic documents will take a while to be generalized. However, classes like Agron 590 is a great incentive to be proactive and willing to make changes in our current format of work. I strongly believe that if we want change in the way that we communicate science, we need to make it as a community to support the general adoption of it.