In practice, the pointers are the authors. In Computer Science, it’s a mess that works fine in practice. I go to GitHub - if it’s not there, then I google the

In practice, the pointers are the authors. In Computer Science, it’s a mess that works fine in practice. I go to GitHub - if it’s not there, then I google the authors or the name of the project. And I don’t know what I do if I don’t find any of them or their projects, because I’ve never encountered that scenario. I’ve never seen a paper more than say 10 years old and thought “god I wish I had their code/data” because CS moves at a rapid speed. Important stuff is preserved because other people build on it. For example, it becomes the basis of an open source project. Whilst from a rigorous and idealistic point of view, we want central long term data storage, in practice right now the real problem is that _many scientists do not make their data and code available in any form at all_ rather than worrying about pointers decaying.