Beyond the PDF: Rowan Cockett on Reproducible, Composable Science

About this episode

Rowan Cockett discusses building data systems for reproducible and composable science.

Summary  In this episode Rowan Cockett, co-founder and CEO of CurveNote and co-founder of the Continuous Science Foundation, talks about building data systems that make scientific research reproducible, reusable, and easier to communicate. He digs into the sociotechnical roots of the reproducibility crisis - from data integrity and access to entrenched publishing incentives and PDF-bound workflows. He explores open standards and tools like Jupyter, Jupyter Book, and the push toward cloud-optimized formats (e.g., Zarr), along with graceful degradation strategies that keep interactive research usable over time. Rowan details how CurveNote enables interactive, reproducible articles that spin up compute on demand while delegating large dataset storage to specialized partners, and how community efforts like the Continuous Science Foundation and initiatives with Creative Commons aim to fix credit, licensing, and attribution. He also discusses the Open Exchange Architecture (OXA) initiative to establish a modular, computational standard for sharing science, the momentum in computational biosciences and neuroscience, and why true progress hinges on interoperability and composability…

People in this episode

Host: Tobias Macey

Guest: Rowan Cockett

Topics covered

• reproducible science
• data systems
• scientific research
• open standards
• computational standards
• interoperability
• composability

Keywords

• reproducibility crisis
• data integrity
• cloud-optimized formats
• interactive research
• credit and attribution
• computational biosciences
• neuroscience

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: CurveNote, Continuous Science Foundation, Creative Commons, Open Exchange Architecture (OXA)

Products: Jupyter, Jupyter Book, Zarr

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