Editorial On Writing Reproducible and Interactive Papers

While most publishers of scientific journals provide online archives of papers, in addition to or as a replacement for printed issues, the versions available online remain static documents. They fail to take advantage of the richness of interactivity that the digital world can offer. The time has come to offer authors, who submit their work for publication in the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, emerging technology options that will allow them to provide a richer experience to readers and to share data and code used in producing their results. Adoption of such technologies will also help in promoting data and code transparency, which is important for addressing growing concerns on reproducibility of research results. As an exercise in developing an interactive publication, this editorial is written as a Jupyter notebook that automatically generates the print version. The notebook can be modified and the results regenerated, if the reader so desires. We walk through the development of this notebook, for readers who wish to adopt this approach in their own writing.