Effective Computation in Physics

Chapter 21. Collaboration

It was once the case that collaboration involved letters being sent through the mail from scientist to scientist.

Today, collaborations happen via email, conference calls, and journal articles. In addition to these tools, web-based content and task management tools enable scientific collaborations to be made effortlessly across continents, in myriad time zones, and even between scientists who have never met. Indeed, some of the first enormous modern collaborations in the physical sciences spurred the progenitors of the collaboration tools that currently exist (not least of all, the Internet). In the context of computation, issue ticketing systems can be closely tied to version control systems and become powerful tools for peer review.

This chapter will demonstrate how such tools expedite and add peer-review capabilities to collaborative research discussions, writing papers, and developing scientific software. These ticket management systems provide a system for content management alongside version-controlled repositories. Sites like GitHub, Launchpad, and Bitbucket, which provide content management for hosted version-controlled repositories, are essential to modern collaboration.

Additionally, this chapter will describe the interface for pull requests that allows collaborators to peer review code. Transparent archiving and opportunity for review do for scientific software what the peer-reviewed journal system does for scientific papers. Scientific code ...