Implementing Computational Reproducibility in the Whole Tale Environment

Abstract

We present and define a structured digital object, called a "Tale," for the dissemination and publication of computational scientific findings in the scholarly record. The Tale emerges from the NSF funded Whole Tale project (wholetale.org) which is developing a computational environment designed to capture the entire computational pipeline associated with a scientific experiment and thereby enable computational reproducibility. A Tale allows researchers to create and package code, data and information about the workflow and computational environment necessary to support, review, and recreate the computational results reported in published research. The Tale then captures the artifacts and information needed to facilitate understanding, transparency, and execution of the Tale for review and reproducibility at the time of publication.