Visualization in Reproducible Science

The increasing prevalence of Open Science has brought reproducibility to the center of discussion of the scientific community as a requirement for ensuring the transparency and correctness of a research workflow. The current publishing landscape is evolving, as shown by the emergence of notebook technologies powering a new generation of interactive Web Journals. These use state-of-the-art interactive graphical visualizations and on-demand data processing to research papers, allowing readers to trace every step of the process, from raw data to the finalized visualization. Since there are many Research Notebook technologies and interactive graphical visualization solutions to choose from, we present a summary comparative overview of Web Journals and the Notebook engines that power the interactive, data driven visualizations inside their publications. Given our focus on visualization, our metrics are the support for the most advanced, popular and widely adopted data visualization frameworks. We conclude that Jupyter Notebook is currently the best alternative for the average user, given its popularity and support, combined with broad support for powerful and high-level interactive visualization grammars.