Open Access and why that is important to me
My name is Fulco Scherjon, and I am a professional software developer. In my research I design and implement archaeological software. One of my main focal points and the reason I submit this paper is the development of simulation systems. Everybody models in order to understand the complex real world, and everybody once in a while runs at least a mental simulation on what could happen if.... But archaeologists have one major additional problem: their subject of research is long dead! The remains most often gone and their behavior, the subject of most research, only visible in traces and trash. Archaeologists out of necessity model everything. Simulation, the execution of a model through time, is a great aid in their thinking and helps to explore hypothesis and test ideas.
One of the most interesting and frustrating aspects of research using models and simulation software is that there are very few replications of that research. In general science reproduction (making an exact copy) and replication (doing similar experiments) are essential elements of proper research and the way scientific knowledge is expanded. In the natural sciences students practice and reproduce experiments to gain insight into the nature of things, before they can design their own experimental setups. Computational simulations in the social sciences on the other hand are rarely reproduced, let alone replicated. Reproduction is rerunning the same simulation, replication is the re-implementation of that simulation by another researcher, preferably using another developing environment.
Reasons for this lack of replication of research include limited or no interest by publishers into replication results, the major investments needed to implement a copy of previous research and often without any foreseeable future use of the newly implemented system (no followup research), and limited accessibility of the original research. This last hurdle is not necessary and the reason why I write about this. Research and personal experience show that a proper replication is hardly possible without the original research materials. These include source code, documentation by the developers, version control files, input data, and original raw output data. This is minimally needed to allow proper replication of simulation results and reproduction of simulation runs. This does not only allow peer researchers to assess the quality of your research, but also allows them to build upon that research and create more scientific output. Open Access to simulations is needed if the methodology is going to be taken seriously and before it can become part of main stream science.
Open in order to reproduce, open in order to further science!