"It lies in our hands - the community of editors and reviewers - to insist that scientific publications are accompanied by the source code and data required to allow their results and conclusions to be reproduced."

The computational chemistry literature contains no shortage of papers presenting new computational methods or comparing methods to each other. We contend, however, that many of these papers do not meet the bare minimum requirement to be considered research reports: they do not contain sufficient information to allow the work to be reproduced. Without that critical component, these publications are essentially either advertisements or the scientific equivalent of a travelogue, “let me show you some pictures from my laboratory…”. To justify this position, we start with an excerpt from the American Chemical Society’s ‘Ethical Guidelines to Publication of Chemical Research’: “An author’s central obligation is to present an accurate and complete account of the research performed, absolutely avoiding deception, including the data collected or used, as well as an objective discussion of the significance of the research. Data are defined as information collected or used in gen erating research conclusions. The research report and the data collected should contain sufficient detail and reference to public sources of information to permit a trained professional to reproduce the experimental observations”[101]. There are two implications of the last sentence, with its emphasis on reproducibility, to new reports about computational methods: the data used to validate a method should be publicly available as should the source code used to implement the method. Let us take these in order.