Collaboration Tools for Engineer's Research

May 13, 2020

This is the second in a series of articles highlighting new tools and resources offered by IEEE in support of the Open Science movement. Read the first article in the series here.

In today’s environment, the practice of providing tools that enable timely research and information to be shared openly has never been more important. In order to encourage collaborative opportunities that also help enhance the publication process, IEEE authors are able to leverage Code Ocean, which allows them to share the code and data published in their papers, all from the IEEE Xplore platform.

Why is this important? It allows authors to increase the visibility and impact of their work by uploading the code that is associated with an article. By doing this, other researchers can browse, run and modify code, input data to experiment, reproduce and build on this research; adapting it to advance their own work. Code Ocean is accessible through IEEE Xplore, all in the cloud, without any other setup or software license required.

The working copy of the code can be shared with collaborators, co-authors and reviewers, enhancing the peer-review process. After publication, the code is linked to the published article, increasing discoverability and an opportunity for additional citations. This helps encourage replication and reuse of the research.

With the growth in open access publishing, tools like Code Ocean are proving very valuable to researchers and authors around the world. Especially when reproducibility — being able to arrive at the same results using the same data (code) as the initial study — is becoming more challenging.

“Collaboration is very important,” says IEEE Member Anum Ali, a user of the tool.
“The way Code Ocean helps is that the simulations of the researchers today are becoming more and more complex, and reproducing results is becoming non-trivial to say the least, and impossible in some cases. Therefore, tools like Code Ocean help disseminate the code used to produce the results in the paper so that other authors can see/modify the code to benefit their own research.”

Learn more about leveraging Code Ocean to share research with collaborators, co-authors and reviewers.