It is new wrt the history of science, or more specifically the history of academic journals. I am aware of the history of scientific computation -- that's not t

It is new wrt the history of science, or more specifically the history of academic journals. I am aware of the history of scientific computation -- that's not the point. The point is that scientists don't need to publish certain things, one of them being the source code that helped them discover their findings. Shell scripts and database migrations aren't super interesting, but you would want them if you needed to replicate results. I'm not saying they're interesting as published research, but neither is that random piece of scratch paper you used while trying to understand what is going on in some biological process. It seems like the problem is that non-scientists don't understand the way science happens, and that often the source code isn't something that you would include in an academic journal. Should science be done differently? Maybe. But that discussion is different than "why wont they publish their source?"