The Replication Tax: Shifting the Financial Burden to Incentivize Reproducibility in Computational Research

Despite the innate reproducibility of software, computational science continues to struggle with reproducibility. The GSI mandate to establish best practices for computational reproducibility in high-performance geospatial software is a platform to change the behavior of computational scientists. We propose an economic approach: a “replication tax” on all publications in high-performance geospatial science. The easier it is to replicate research results, the less it costs authors to demonstrate their results are replicable.