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Someone who owns the same tools should be able to replicate the results of the paper without rewriting its code. Whether these tools (e.g. Matlab or your softwa
by Hermel 11y ago
Someone who owns the same tools should be able to replicate the results of the paper without rewriting its code. Whether these tools (e.g. Matlab or your software) come at a cost is a secondary concern as long as it is not prohibitively high.
What I dislike the most are computational articles that give no indication whatsoever about the employed tools and programming languages.
- dalke 11y agoA problem is, what does it mean to "own the same tools"? If I develop my own tools, which no one else has, and I never distribute them, then it's the trivial edge case that everyone who owns those tools (me!) can replicate the results. If I sell the tools under a BSD license for $1,000,000 then it might still be trivial for those who pay me that sum to reproduce the results. But those who argue for source code access usually want the source code available for $0 or a pittance compared to the development costs. You agree that it should not be "prohibitively high". How do we turn that into something actionable? If $1M is too high, then what about $100K? Does the requirement extend to providing documentation? Even if such documentation doesn't already exist? For one job, I fixed a few bugs in software that was commented in Russian, and I speak no Russian. Is this too high of a barrier to entry? And if so, should all code be commented in English?