  Reproducibility of research is essential for science. However, in the way
modern computational biology research is done, it is easy to lose track of
small, but extremely critical, details. Key details, such as the specific
version of a software used or iteration of a genome can easily be lost in the
shuffle, or perhaps not noted at all. Much work is being done on the database
and storage side of things, ensuring that there exists a space to store
experiment-specific details, but current mechanisms for recording details are
cumbersome for scientists to use. We propose a new metadata description
language, named MEDFORD, in which scientists can record all details relevant to
their research. Human-readable, easily-editable, and templatable, MEDFORD
serves as a collection point for all notes that a researcher could find
relevant to their research, be it for internal use or for future replication.
MEDFORD has been applied to coral research, documenting research from RNA-seq
analyses to photo collections.
