Open Source

What is open source software? It’s free! Not necessarily free as in “free lunch,” but “free as in freedom”—freedom to use software without restriction, tweak the code at will, and liberty from annoying features just “because the developer said so.” Open source software allows creativity and innovation by allowing tinkerers, developers, and users to decide what they want from their software. I’ve been using open-source products and tools for years. My education and professional work has been empowered by R / Rstudio, Ubuntu, and Python. These are just a few examples. There are countless open-source tools that power modern life.

As a statistician, I use the R programming language daily to create analyses, simulation studies, and prototype estimators. I make an effort to publish the code from my published analyses, to the extent allowed by other restrictions, like data-use agreements and privacy concerns. Publishing free code benefits everyone in the statistical community. Here are just a few ways:

• Fosters an atmosphere of trust: Since anyone may reproduce the results with free code.
• Enables replication: With the code freely available, researchers conducting replication studies may use the exact code on their data.
• Improves publication quality: Reviewers may examine the code and decide if manuscripts closely match the actual analysis.
• Lowers barriers to reproducibility: Others may wonder what happens if they change the analysis slightly. Rather than needing to start from scratch, the small change can be made directly. There is no need to wonder if the results would be reproduced with this small change!

If you’re interested in my own open code, check out my Github!

*or something