E — Ephemeral

If a research object can produce its results in a temporary, disposable environment built solely from its own contents, this provides strong evidence that its other STAMPED properties hold in practice. Inputs must be exhaustively specified (S), outputs deposited correctly (T), and nothing outside the boundary relied upon. Ephemerality is a form of validation: “make it a habit to destroy the environment.”

Beyond validation, ephemeral environments enable scaling – when each computational job runs in an independent, disposable instance, work can be parallelized across subjects, parameters, or datasets.

At a minimum, a research object should be able to produce results from a fresh clone on a system that meets its stated requirements (P). At the ideal end, every computation runs in a disposable environment that is created and destroyed per execution.

See the STAMPED paper for the full treatment.

From Script to STAMPED Research Object

20 February 2026·9 mins

Reproducibility Rigor Transparency Reusable Accessible Pattern S — Self-contained T — Tracked A — Actionable M — Modular P — Portable E — Ephemeral D — Distributable Shell Posix Awk Make Git Singularity Containers

Four scenarios showing how to incrementally add STAMPED properties to a shell-based analysis using git, make, and singularity.

Ephemeral Shell Scripts for Reproducing Issues

19 February 2026·6 mins

Reproducibility Rigor Transparency Reusable Accessible Pattern S — Self-contained A — Actionable E — Ephemeral P — Portable Shell Posix Reproducer Bug-Report Testing

Distills a common practice among open-source developers: writing throwaway shell scripts that set up a fresh environment, reproduce a problem, and can be shared as actionable bug reports or starting points for test cases.

Re-executing Computations with datalad rerun

19 February 2026·7 mins

Reproducibility Rigor Reusable Tool A — Actionable E — Ephemeral Datalad Reproducibility Re-Execution

Demonstrates how datalad rerun enables re-execution of previously recorded datalad run commands, turning provenance records into actionable recipes.