How to share code in your research article

Want to increase the visibility and impact of the code you develop during your research?

We’re partnering with the research code experts at Code Ocean to make it easier for you to link your journal articles to the associated code. Find out how readers can also run code directly from your article on Taylor & Francis Online.

Why share your research code?

It’s becoming more common for researchers and developers to share the code they’ve produced. There are many reasons why you should consider doing so, including:

• Getting credit and citations for a type of research output that often remains behind the scenes
• Making your research projects more discoverable
• Building trust in your research by helping to make it transparent and reproducible
• Enabling other researchers to reuse and build on your code
• Saving yourself future headaches by preserving your code in a repository.

What is Code Ocean?

Code Ocean is a web-based interface that allows you to write code in any open-source programming language with any computing resources needed. It provides an easy way to share, discover, and run code. By using Code Ocean you can increase the visibility to your research, as well as:

• Getting a DOI to receive citations for your code
• Collaborating with colleagues using different programming languages
• Enabling others to use your code in the same computational environment as you, without the need for setup and installation.

Our partnership with Code Ocean also allows readers to access and run code directly from your article.

How to share code alongside your journal article

1. When you submit to a participating Taylor & Francis journal (see below), you’ll be asked whether there is code associated with your article. If you confirm that there is, you’ll be emailed a link and details about how to deposit your code with Code Ocean.
2. Before your article is published online, upload your code to the Code Ocean platform, specifying the appropriate languages and dependencies to create an executable “compute capsule”.
3. After you submit your code, the Code Ocean team will verify that everything works. The compute capsule will then be assigned a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI), helping other researchers to cite it easily. Code Ocean capsules can be freely edited, modified, or downloaded by readers for extension and reuse.
4. On publication of your journal article your code will be available alongside it, enabling readers to view and verify the article’s results.

Piloting Code Ocean on Taylor & Francis Online

The latest phase of our partnership with Code Ocean began on February 1, 2021. Code Ocean linking and the ability for readers to use code directly from an article is now available for all new submissions to the following journals:

• Big Earth Data
• Biostatistics & Epidemiology
• Cogent Mathematics & Statistics
• Communications in Statistics – Simulation and Computation
• Communications in Statistics – Theory and Methods
• Communications in Statistics: Case Studies, Data Analysis and Applications
• Geocarto International
• GIScience & Remote Sensing
• International Journal of Digital Earth
• International Journal of Modelling and Simulation
• Mathematical and Computer Modelling of Dynamical Systems
• Separation Science & Technology
• SICE Journal of Control, Measurement, and System Integration

When you submit your next article to one of these journals, please follow the steps outlined above to ensure your published article is correctly linked. Please do not submit your code to Code Ocean until you are prompted to do so during the manuscript submission process, using a unique link we will send you.

If you’re submitting to a journal which isn’t part of this pilot, or if your article has already been published, you can still deposit your code with Code Ocean. If you do, please provide your article’s DOI. This will create a link from Code Ocean to the paper on Taylor & Francis Online.

Find out how you can also share your Code Ocean compute capsules when publishing with F1000 Research.

Choose Open Research

Research outputs can take many forms – whether this be an article, code, data, or graphs. At Taylor & Francis we want to help researchers open up all these crucial elements of research, making them transparent and visible. This ensures research results can be verified and reproduced, and that researchers are given credit for all their valuable outputs.

Find out about some of the ways you can open up your research:

Open data and data sharing: Taylor & Francis supports a number of open data initiatives
Registered Reports: Have your study peer reviewed and get an in-principle acceptance before you start collecting your data
Preprints: post your original manuscript to a preprint server before you submit it to a peer reviewed journal
Open Science Badges: icons for your articles when you share data, materials, or preregister