Virtual Reference Environments: a simple way to make research reproducible

‘Reproducible research ’ has received increasing attention over the past few years as bioinformatics and computational biol-ogy methodologies become more complex. Although reproducible research is progressing in several valuable ways, we sug-gest that recent increases in internet bandwidth and disk space, along with the availability of open-source and free-soft-ware licences for tools, enable another simple step to make research reproducible. In this article, we urge the creation of minimal virtual reference environments implementing all the tools necessary to reproduce a result, as a standard part of publication. We address potential problems with this approach, and show an example environment from our own work. Key words: reproducible research; virtual environments; open source Replication of results is a central tenet of science; the idea that a meaningful result should be able to be replicated, and that publi-cation should describe it in enough detail for this to be possible, motivates a large part of the basic activity of science. Although the degree to which this is possible for large experimental results is under debate [1], it is reasonable to say that demonstrating and promoting replication of a result is valued by scientists