On the open-source landscape of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine
Mathieu Boudreau, Nikola Stikov, Peter Jezzard
The tides of the open-source movement reached the coast of our journal just prior to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic with an editorial1 on reproducibility and the future of MRI research. In it the authors argued that, for improved reproducibility, the concept of a “paper” should be extended to encapsulate the entirety of the scholarly work done authors. These extensions should include data and analysis code, which may be as essential to papers as figures and tables. In the spring of 2020, the journal therefore added an optional (but strongly encouraged) Data Availability Statement section to articles, making it easier to access supplementary data and code from an author’s linked repository. Also, the journal’s outreach initiative, MRM Highlights,1 transitioned from highlighting Editor’s Picks, to focusing on articles that demonstrate exemplary reproducible research practices, such as sharing all the data/code needed to reproduce figures, the use of Jupyter/R Markdown notebooks, container technology (eg., Docker, Singularity), interactive figures, etc. In addition to the Highlights interviews that showcased the authors and their publication, each feature was accompanied by an additional written interview where those authors explicitly discussed their reproducible research practices.
In this editorial, we explore the reproducible research practices of the community in the wake of these changes.