standards for code

Publication: Improving the standards for publishing code

Grantham supervisor Professor Robert Freckleton publishes new paper exploring the standards for publishing code.

Robert is a Professor of Population Biology at the School of Biosciences at the University of Sheffield.

Standards for publishing code

The paper argues that there has been a ‘seismic shift in attitudes of ecologists and evolutionary biologists’ around outputs of research. Papers are increasingly not the only outputs from research. Data and other components of the research are also extremely significant.

However, this brings about new problems for researchers and journals. For example, how are ecologists able to trust the quality of their data? How can journals ensure quality? How do we know that the tools we publish are reliable and can safely be used by our community?

As a result of this need for quality, the paper suggests some code guidelines. They also aim to maximise the accessibility and usability of what we publish.

Read: Accessibility, reusability, reliability: Improving the standards for publishing code in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. It is a free access paper.

Grantham Scholars supervised by Rob Freckleton

Robert supervises Grantham Scholar James Lambert. James’s project used drones to monitor the weed black-grass, and you can read more about his research here.

Also supervised by Rob was Dr Monica Ortiz. Monica’s project looked at how wheat production would be impacted by climate change. If you want to find out then you can see her project page.


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Photo by Kevin Ku from Pexels.