The cascad certification agency and the CASD jointly offer a certification process for articles based on data accessed through the CASD. The cascad-CASD certification allows researchers to signal the reproducibility nature of their research to their peers.
The goal of the certification is to formally test whether the results in the tables and figures can be reproduced from the computer code and the confidential data used by the researcher.
The Certification Agency for Scientific Code and Data (cascad) is a not-for-profit certification agency created with the support of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, Foundations, universities, and local governments.
This partnership aims to establish secured certification environments which will allow a reviewer to run the code and check the results. The Comité du Secret Statistique and the data producers have favourably greeted this initiative and we are grateful to them.
The partnership is currently in a trial phase. The CASD will give the cascad reviewer access to a virtual machine in which both the required confidential data and the computer code are made available, and only during the certification process.
If you’re interested in taking part to our trial program:
- Contact CASD;
- Provide your code, your paper as a pdf file, and a readme file. This file must indicate the researchers’ names and affiliations, the name of the journal (only for published or forthcoming papers), the CASD datasets, the software as well as the required libraries and their versions. The file must also indicate the code workflow: is there a masterfile which will run the whole code, or several files that have to be ran successively? Which ones yield the results that must be certified?
- The code must be commented so that the cascad reviewer will have no difficulties in understanding it. Also, the variables must have the same name in the article and in the code. Alternatively, a glossary mapping the variables names in the article and in the code must be provided.
- Certifications are free of charges for researchers, in the limit of one per project. The certification process is supposed to take two weeks at most. Certifications are carried out by a cascad staff member who is accredited by the Comité du Secret Statistique.
- At the end of the certification process, a reproducibility certificate is sent to the author. Both the code and the article will be deposited in the open-access repository Zenodo (unless stated otherwise), where they will be given a DOI.
Cost : free
Period : around 15 days