SPIE Implements Coding for Journal Authors

SPIE, the professional society for optics and photonics technology, now enables journal authors to share code through its new partnership with Code Ocean, an open, computational reproducibility platform enabling researchers to run, share, discover code in an executable, cloud-based environment.

Authors publishing journal articles advancing light-based technologies in the SPIE Digital Library now have the option to include links to the executable code. Code Ocean is integrated into the journal manuscript submission workflow. Authors of accepted articles use the simple interface to upload code to the platform where it is assigned a digital object identifier to support correct attribution and citation. Upon publication in the SPIE Digital Library, these articles include a link enabling users to access and run the code on the Code Ocean platform. Authors retain copyright for the code and can authorize various levels of reuse licensing.

"Our partnership with Code Ocean enables authors to demonstrate the reproducibility of their code and increases transparency of the research we publish," said Gwen Weerts, managing editor at SPIE. "Code is often an essential research output across the disciplines of optics and photonics covered by SPIE journals. By partnering with Code Ocean, our authors will find it is easier to link their code to their published journal articles."

Code Ocean supports more than 10 programming languages and mirrors the computational environment of the original code to eliminate barriers for researchers who wish to analyze and reproduce findings or potentially apply it to solve new research problems. The cloud-based platform significantly reduces the time and investment required to execute the original code using the exact version of the computing language, hardware, operating system, dependency files, and original data sets.

"We are delighted to partner with SPIE to support their authors and broad readership,” said Simon Adar, CEO of Code Ocean. “We want to allow researchers to spend their time inventing and discovering new findings, instead of rebuilding other researchers' code. Researchers using an article within the SPIE Digital Library will find it is easy to upload data or change parameters to run experiments on Code Ocean, running everything in the cloud. We want to inspire new collaborations and faster advancement across scientific fields."

SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, an educational non-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based science, engineering and technology.