I 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 "secre

I 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.