Use case
A diligence team can rerun a finding before licensing it
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.
A rerun checks the method instead of the reputation
Claim: hypothesis
Industry decisions often rest on a few published numbers. If the analysis behind them can't be rerun, the buyer is trusting a methods section and a reputation. A rerun before the deal, under a confidentiality agreement where the code is private, shows whether the number comes out of the data the way the paper says.
What would show this claim is wrong
- Deals made after a rerun turn out no better, measured by later replication or write-downs, than deals made without one.
Buyers make a rerun part of technical diligence
Claim: hypothesis
Pharmaceutical, device and investment firms could make a rerun part of standard technical diligence, done by their own analysts or by an outside reproducibility service. The buyer pays, as it already pays for legal and technical diligence, because a finding that doesn't hold up is a write-down later. Rerunnable pipelines can also be reused, which speeds up development after the deal.
What would show this claim is wrong
- Authors and their institutions won't grant diligence access even under a confidentiality agreement.
One analyst reruns the analysis behind your next deal
Claim: hypothesis
On your next licensing or investment review that rests on a published analysis, ask the authors for access to a companion repository and have one analyst follow the program's rerun protocol.
What would show this claim is wrong
- The rerun takes longer than the deal timeline allows.
Related
- Companion Executable Code Repositories
- A funder can ask for a rerun before renewing a grant
- A private repository lets a reviewer rerun code that can't be public