A note to the reader

Abstract

In many branches of engineering and science there is a substantial computational element. Earth-imaging seismology is one of these. In taking up computational problems we should abandon books, journals, and reports and replace them with electronic documents that can be used to recreate any print document, including its figures, from its underlying data and computations. Today, few published results are reproducible in any practical sense. To verify them requires almost as much effort as it took to create them originally. After a time, authors are often unable to reproduce their own results! For these reasons, many people ignore most of the literature. In the past this scandalous waste of time and energy may have been justified by the high cost and incompatibility of data-processing machines. But with standards for Fortran, C, UNIX, LTEX, Postscript, 2 Xwindow, CD-ROM, and shirt-pocket-sized two-gigabyte tapes, there is no longer any excuse for nonreproducible research. It is time to plunge into this new era.