Repro: An Open-Source Library for Improving the Reproducibility and Usability of Publicly Available Research Code
This addresses reproducibility issues for researchers using public code, though it is incremental as it builds on existing containerization tools.
The authors tackled the problem of reproducing research code by developing Repro, an open-source library that runs code from 30+ papers in Docker containers with pre-configured environments, eliminating user setup.
We introduce Repro, an open-source library which aims at improving the reproducibility and usability of research code. The library provides a lightweight Python API for running software released by researchers within Docker containers which contain the exact required runtime configuration and dependencies for the code. Because the environment setup for each package is handled by Docker, users do not have to do any configuration themselves. Once Repro is installed, users can run the code for the 30+ papers currently supported by the library. We hope researchers see the value provided to others by including their research code in Repro and consider adding support for their own research code.