General orientation

[krassowski]

Hi everyone, thank you for contributing to this eLife Sprint. Briefly, the idea of this project is to make it easier to interactively search and explore existing repositories with scientific code which are extensions of publications. I will be opening a few issues to enable everyone joining to pick up a small task to get started. Please feel very welcome to share your thoughts on the ideas proposed, including both the technical detains and the design goals itself.

For now, it might make sense to limit the scope to public repositories hosted on GitHub or GitLab, but certainly other git-based services can be incorporated later.

[mstimberg]

Just a general thought: I think what could be an interesting angle specific to academic papers is to focus on the figures as the scientific output. I.e., the main task of the tool would be to figure out what figures of the paper can be recreated using the repository and how. It would also be cool to not only take into account the code itself but also additional information that might be present in a README file, or even in the publication itself.

[krassowski]

Great idea! Going a little bit further I would say that the supplementary files are oftentimes as important; I find that these can serve as a good bridge between paper and repository too.

Of course not everyone commits figure-generating code and a code to export the supplements but if we can encourage it by creating a tool which builds on an assumption of those being present, that would be a small stride in the right direction.