The Future of Replication

Abstract

Since the replication standard was proposed for political science research, more journals have required or encouraged authors to make data available, and more authors have shared their data. The calls for continuing this trend are more persistent than ever, and the agreement among journal editors in this Symposium continues this trend. In this article, I offer a vision of a possible future of the replication movement. The plan is to implement this vision via the Virtual Data Center project, which {\textendash} by automating the process of finding, sharing, archiving, subsetting, converting, analyzing, and distributing data {\textendash} may greatly facilitate adherence to the replication standard.