The Journal
What our works could be used for, each a hypothesis with a first step and what would show it wrong.
Use case
A clinician deciding whether a study applies to their patients needs the exact definitions behind its conclusion: what counted as treatment response, which patients were left out, which thresholds were used. A companion repository shows them in the code that ran, with the data dictionary, and later releases show whether the finding held on new patients.
Use case
Before a company licenses a biomarker, invests in a device or builds on a published result, its diligence team can rerun the analysis behind the finding. A companion repository, public or shared privately under an agreement, turns a judgment about the authors into a check of the method.
Use case
A funder or program officer deciding whether to renew a grant usually reads the progress report and the papers. With companion repositories, the funder can also see the actual analysis pipelines, compare methods across the grants in a portfolio, and ask for a rerun of the result the renewal depends on.
Use case
A journal editor can ask authors to submit a companion repository with the paper, run automated checks and a rerun before review, and hand reviewers a short report: what ran, what matched the paper's numbers, and what was flagged. Reviewers spend their time on the science, and the journal can mark papers whose results rerun.
Use case
A research team can publish a companion repository with its paper. When a reviewer asks how a number was produced, the answer is a release that reruns it. The team gets a citable software record, a precise history of every analysis decision, and a way to update the method as new data arrives.
Use case
An online course platform could watch how each learner is doing and send a short explanation, an example or a practice item at the point where that learner struggles, instead of sending everyone through the same lessons.
Use case
A company could give its staff an assistant that reads where they are and what they are doing (the job, the screen, the place) and offers a short instruction for that step, so people learn while they work instead of in a separate course.
Use case
A school or an online learning company could give students a chatbot that, instead of writing a general answer, finds the short part of the course material that fits the question and the assignment the student is working on, and sends that.