Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A Theme Issue on Reproducibility

We are delighted to announce the publication of a Theme Issue in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. The issue is titled “Reliability and Reproducibility in Computational Science: Implementing Verification, Validation and Uncertainty Quantification in Silico” and a significant proportion of the papers contained therein stems from research led by UCL’s Centre for Computational Science through VECMA. The theme issue also stems from an event hosted by The Alan Turing Institute in London in early 2020 under the same title, where several of the issue’s contributors met to prepare for its production.

The theme issue addresses the question whether the computational methods and models used today are sufficiently reliable to generate actionable results. The question is analyzed based on three notions of reliability. Verification (V): that the model correctly implements the intended theory. Validation (V): agreement between model and experiment. Uncertainty quantification (UQ): identification of the provenance and magnitude of errors within the model, in other words how accurately the model captures reality. VVUQ lies at the heart of VECMA’s mission statement, “to enable trust in computer simulations as tools in the decision-making process for scientists as well as for policy makers in an era where science is afflicted by the ‘reproducibility crisis’ ”.