My professor requires the software, data and makefiles to reproduce any figure in a published paper. Then the figure would be erased with software reproducing i

My professor requires the software, data and makefiles to reproduce any figure in a published paper. Then the figure would be erased with software reproducing it. The motivation was kind of selfish. The professor would update his textbooks every 5 or 10 years and noted how hard it was to recover old figures.