Panel Discussion

A panel discussion on Getting recognition for excellence in computational statistics took place at the end of the official conference program. Panelists included representatives of well-established journals in computational statistics and of the ASA sections on statistical computing and graphics.

They discussed how recent developments in computational statistics impact the performance assessment in peer-reviewed journals and professional careers.

In the first part of the discussion, each panelist gave a slide-based introduction of the represented journal or society. This was followed, in the second part, by an open discussion of a variety of questions raised by the auditorium and the panel host.

Panelists were as follows.

Their short presentations addressed the following issues.

• Scope, vision and the notion and role of "computing" in the represented journals.
• Infrastructure for and policy towards distributing software, data and code as part of a journal publication.
• Professional activities related to statistical computing and statistical graphics/
• Metrics for excellence in computational statistics.

Key topics in the open discussion were as follows.

• The role of reproducibility in scientific publications.
• Giving credit to software by means of appropriate citation.
• The tension between the proliferation of open source software and its dissemination via closed access journals (including their on-line complements).
• Legal aspects of publications featuring software (in particular concerning copyright transfer practices).
• The urgent need for developing standards for peer code reviews.

The full panel discussion can be downloaded as a video in various formats: [wmv] (450 MB) | [mpeg] (839 MB) | [mov] (304 MB). Additionally, the audio only is also available as [mp3] (58 MB). Due to the size, please download the full file (right click and "save as...") rather than streaming it in your browser.