LiveDocs: Crafting Interactive Development Environments From Research Findings

Abstract

Open Science is a recurrent topic in scientific discussion, and there is a current effort to make research more accessible to a broader audience. A focus on delivering research findings that are reproducible, or even re-usable has been proposed as one way of achieving such accessibility goals. In this work, we present the LiveDocs initiative, an effort of the ``Collaborative Research Center 1456 - Mathematics of Experiment'' on tackling common issues of reproducibility and re-usability in scientific publications. The LiveDocs initiative is proposed as a concept alongside a collection of methods that enable scientists to provide research findings under an interactive development environment. This environment allows users from a broader audience to easily reproduce research findings by re-running scripts, for instance, those that generate figures, tables, and other elements from scientific publications. Moreover, LiveDocs also allow the audience to interact with code and data in such environments, thus allowing users to explore algorithms, datasets and software interfaces. This directly lowers the barriers to access and comprehend research methods and findings, which facilitates more scientific exchange and fosters knowledge advancement.