SHARE: a web portal for creating and sharing executable research papers

This paper describes how SHARE (Sharing Hosted Autonomous Research Environments) satisfies the criteria of the Elsevier 2011 Executable Paper Grand Challenge. This challenge aims at disseminating the use of systems that provide reviewers and fellow scientists a convenient way to reproduce computational results of research papers. This can involve among others the calculation of a number, the plotting of a diagram, the automatic proof of a theorem or the interactive transformation of various inputs into a complex output document. Besides reproducing the literate results, readers of an executable paper should also be able to explore the result space by entering different input parameters than the ones reported in the original text. SHARE is a web portal that enables academics to create, share, and access remote virtual machines that can be cited from research papers. By deploying in SHARE a copy of the required operating system as well as all the relevant software and data, authors can make a conventional paper fully reproducible and interactive. Shared virtual machines can also contain the original paper text— when desirable even with embedded computations.