But this is a problem that <i>can</i> be tackled, and those who take it seriouslt already do so. For example, in our pipelines we use an infrastructure that always adds every command executed on the file, with every exact parameter, to the metadata of the file, starting from one canonical archived file - and hence, one can indeed reproduce manually the result of the pipeline given sufficient time and dedication. [Edit: we also write the git shar1]<p>The same way that say, biology labs have processes they engage in in order to convince us that their samples are not contaminated, we can have processes that lead to the reproducibility of data.