> Buckheit & Donoho (1995) explained almost 20 years ago that, an article about computational result is advertising, not scholarship. It's been years since I

> Buckheit & Donoho (1995) explained almost 20 years ago that, an article about computational result is advertising, not scholarship. It's been years since I read a PNAS paper but I still remember the disclaimer for each paper that since the author contributed money towards the publication, it must legally be described as "advertisement." Thus, advertising and scholarship are not incompatible. The original quote is slightly different: "An article about computational science in a scientific publication is not the scholarship itself, it is merely advertising of the scholarship. The actual scholarship is the complete software development environment and the complete set of instruction which generate the figures." My two, relatively minor but still important, qualms are: 1) the important thing is to be able to verify a claim, not reproduce the method to get the claim. In most cases those are the same thing. But consider the RSA Factoring Challenge. It's easy to verify that RSA640 was correctly factored, even without access to the underlying hardware or algorithms. At that point you know that only a fraction of the world's compute power is needed to factor that number. I've seen this in my own field of computational chemistry where one paper proposed a way to categorize molecules and a later paper published counter-examples which showed failure cases. The details of how to find the failure case aren't always important - they might even be done with only brain power. Thus there can be good scholarship without knowing the complete compute environment of the paper. 2) Not everyone has images which are machine reproducible from the raw data. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_diagram#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_diagram#History describes how Richardson converted 3D protein structures to hand-drawn diagrams: > These drawings were made in pen on tracing paper over a printout of a Cα trace of the atomic coordinates; they preserved positions, smoothed the backbone path, and incorporated small local shifts to disambiguate the visual appearance. While there are many computer programs which can do most of those steps, the final presentation may still be tweaked manually when disambiguation is more important than absolute fidelity. (The coordinates are usually available, so it's still possible to get the fidelity.)