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v2026.1714 entries · CC-BY 4.0
Dictionary termTrack CStablev2026.2

Open code

The practice of releasing the source code used in a study, under an open-source licence, alongside the publication, such that any reader may inspect, reuse, and re-execute the analysis.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board
· Last updated 21 May 2026

Examples

Worked examples

  • Is an instance

    A study's analysis scripts published on GitHub and archived in Zenodo with DOI on paper acceptance.

  • Is an instance

    A bioinformatics pipeline released under MIT licence with a CITATION.cff file.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

  • Not an instance

    Code 'available on reasonable request'.

  • Not an instance

    Pseudocode in a methods section.

Editorial commentary

Open code is a necessary condition for reproducibility" class="text-primary underline-offset-2 hover:underline" data-autolinked="true" title="Computational reproducibility — CASRAI Dictionary">computational reproducibility and a strong signal of methodological transparency. Best practice involves a version-controlled repository (typically Git/GitHub/GitLab) with a permanent archival snapshot (Zenodo, Software Heritage), a licence (MIT, BSD, GPL, Apache-2.0), and a citation file (CITATION.cff).

References

  • Barba, 'Terminologies for Reproducible Research' (arXiv, 2018); FORCE11 Software Citation Principles.

Also known as

open-source research code · shared analysis code

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element
xml
<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Open code"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/open-code" />
Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)
json
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "name": "Open code",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/open-code",
  "description": "The practice of releasing the source code used in a study, under an open-source licence, alongside the publication, such that any reader may inspect, reuse, and re-execute the analysis.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/reproducibility-and-computational-research/",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/open-code",
  "sameAs": [
    "open-source research code",
    "shared analysis code"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}

Adopted by research universities worldwide

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  • University of Oxford logo
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