Executable Papers for the R Community: The R2 Platform for Reproducible Research

Reviewing the computational part of scientific papers puts a lot of effort on referees: even if authors provide their data and code the referee often needs to install additional software on his machine and figure out which parts of the code belong to which part of the manuscript. As a result, computational results or often not reviewed at all. We propose a new web service which outsources validation of computational results in executable papers to an independent third party. Our system adapts the well-tested toolbox currently checking R extension packages in software repositories like CRAN to check manuscripts in paper repositories. In addition, paper packages can easily be downloaded from the server and installed to replicate results locally by anyone wishing to do so.