Reblogged from The Political Methodologist.
A complete research project hosted on GitHub is reproducible and transparent by default in a more comprehensive manner than a typical journal mandated replication archive […] Maintaining your research project on GitHub confers advantages beyond the social desireability of the practice and the the technical benefits of using a revision control system. Making your research publicly accessible in this manner makes it considerably easier to replicate, meaning that, all else equal, more people will build on your work, leading to higher citation counts and impact […] If open research of this sort was to become a norm in political science, it is hard to imagine that the field would not advance more quickly.Using Git and Github confers non-trivial technical advantages, has a low startup cost given the array of modern software that interfaces with Git, is desireable from a social perspective and an individual perspective, and provides a helpful pedagogical service as well.