ACM Transactions on Graphics

ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), in collaboration with the Graphics Replicability Stamp Initiative (GRSI),  is introducing a replicability initiative to encourage greater sharing and replicability of scientific results in the graphics community.  This kind of initiative is being supported by a growing list of publishers, journals and conferences.  The initiative promotes reproducibility of research results and allows scientists and practitioners to immediately benefit from state-of-the-art research results, without spending months re-implementing the proposed algorithms and trying to find the right parameter values. We also hope that it will indirectly foster scientific progress, since it allows researchers to reliably compare with and build upon existing techniques, knowing that they are using exactly the same implementation.

TOG's replicability initiative is a part of ACM's overall Result and Artifact Review and Badging Program. The ACM Results Replicability Stamp is an additional recognition for authors of accepted papers who are willing to go a step further by providing a complete implementation of their algorithm, allowing replication of the results presented in their paper. The stamp is not meant to be a measure of the scientific quality of the paper or of the usefulness of presented algorithms. Rather, it is an endorsement of the replicability of the results presented in the paper.  Furthermore, the ACM Artifacts Available Stamp is a recognition of the service provided to the community by releasing the code and/or data. It alerts users of the ACM Digital Library to the presence and location of these artifacts.

TOG is collaborating with the Graphics Replicability Stamp Initiative (GRSI), an independent group of volunteers who want to help the community by enabling sharing of code and data as a community resource for non-commercial use. The volunteers review the submitted code and certify its replicability as described in the Process document.

Any paper accepted in 2017 to ACM Transactions on Graphics is eligible to apply for the stamp. Applications for the ACM Results Replicated stamp will be considered only after the paper has been fully accepted.  Submissions that are awarded the ACM replicability stamp will receive additional exposure by being listed on the ACM Digital Library and the GRSI website.  The choice to apply for the stamp is entirely at the discretion of the authors. Authors wishing to apply for the Results Replicability Stamp and/or the Artifacts Available Stamp should follow the procedure below.

The Application Process

The application process, designed by the Graphics Replicability Stamp Initiative, is lightweight.  TOG will email the contact author of every TOG paper a simple form requiring general information on the submission, a representative image, a link to a public git repository with the source code, and instructions on how to compile and replicate the results. The code should compile on a vanilla installation of one of the major operating systems (Linux, MacOSX, or Windows), have a license that allows non-commercial usage, and only depend on libraries that are free for academic or research purposes.  The code quality will not be evaluated. The purpose of the stamp is only to ensure replicability of the results. In its simplest form, the code should reproduce the data used to generate every result figure shown in the paper.