A very simple and fast way to access and validate algorithms in reproducible research

Abstract

The reproducibility of research in bioinformatics refers to the notion that new methodologies/ algorithms and scientific claims have to be published together with their data and source code, in a way that other researchers may verify the findings to further build more knowledge upon them. The replication and corroboration of research results are key to the scientific process and many journals are discussing the matter nowadays, taking concrete steps in this direction. In this journal itself, a very recent opinion note has appeared highlighting the increasing importance of this topic in bioinformatics and computational biology, inviting the community to further discuss the matter. In agreement with that article, we would like to propose here another step into that direction with a tool that allows the automatic generation of a web interface, named web-demo, directly from source code in a very simple and straightforward way. We believe this contribution can help make research not only reproducible but also more easily accessible. A web-demo associated to a published paper can accelerate an algorithm validation with real data, wide-spreading its use with just a few clicks.