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I debate about this constantly with my office-mate, who--unfortunately--represents the conservative status quo in science. His concerns are that he is worried a
by bravura 16y ago
I debate about this constantly with my office-mate, who--unfortunately--represents the conservative status quo in science. His concerns are that he is worried about being scooped, and that it's bad science to release things before they are finished products.
I am a proponent of open notebook science, and strongly believe that the benefits outweigh the negatives.
Besides the feel-good arguments that this advances science and reproducibility, I'll point out a selfish motivation for releasing code: It makes it more likely that other researchers actually try your methodology and cite you.
I used to get mired down in trying to do formal releases. Now, I realized that releases are a hindrance, and by default all my research code lives in a github repo from day one:
http://github.com/turian http://github.com/turian
For example, here is the page I published on my word representation research, with links to my github code:
http://metaoptimize.com/projects/wordreprs/ http://metaoptimize.com/projects/wordreprs/
- nervechannel 16y agoWhether or not he's an open science fan, that's no excuse for him to refuse to publish code when the paper is out. You should point out that refusing to publish code is like being intentionally hazy about your experimental protocol.
- rue 16y agoI am not sure where the idea that you release the source before publication comes from, but it does seem oddly prevalent given the solution is so easy.
- zbyszek 16y agoI have seen the advantage you point out in action in my former life in computation quantum field theory. When I started, code was jealously guarded as a "secret weapon" in the global competition for publishable results. Then the MILC group (http://physics.indiana.edu/~sg/milc.html http://physics.indiana.edu/~sg/milc.html) started releasing both their data and their code. The result was that they were widely cited and gained much respect in the scientific community, becoming a de facto standard, and facilitated research at institutions without the resources necessary for such computational preliminaries. I'm pleased to say that this approach has become more the norm in this field at least, encouraged by SciDAC ( http://www.scidac.gov/ http://www.scidac.gov/) for example, with raw data (e.g. http://qcd.nersc.gov/ http://qcd.nersc.gov/, http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/qcdgrid/ http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/qcdgrid/) and code (e.g. http://usqcd.jlab.org/usqcd-docs/chroma/ http://usqcd.jlab.org/usqcd-docs/chroma/, http://fermiqcd.net http://fermiqcd.net) being routinely made available. The result is more science all round, which can only be a good thing. The "scooping" thing we all worried about turns out not be such an issue after all.