I agree that when you think about individual researchers it's a negative externality -- in many cases, the researcher doesn't pay, but other members of the rese

I agree that when you think about individual researchers it's a negative externality -- in many cases, the researcher doesn't pay, but other members of the research community do. This is true in programming as well: often the technical debt falls on your collaborators. You understand that crazy code you wrote and didn't document, but no one else does. For the debt perspective to really work, you need to think of the research community as a team working together to advance science. Individual members of that team take out debt to advance their work faster, but in the long run it costs the team more.