It's easy to be so strident. I agree freedom of information requests should always be respected (if nothing else it's the law). That doesn't mean it's useful o

It's easy to be so strident. I agree freedom of information requests should always be respected (if nothing else it's the law). That doesn't mean it's useful on it's own. Unintelligible source code isn't much more useful than none. See CRU's own source code for example: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/11/about-that-cru-hack.html http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/11/about-that-cru-hack.html It's nice that some spend the time to clean up code and format data. But scientists progress on their career track by total number of papers; so they're being somewhat asked choose between the greater good and their own. Most research is publicly funded. If open access is important to you then write to your government representative and ask them to require it.