Disclaimer: Not an academic, and my whilst undergrad thesis included code it was so broken that when others saw it I had nothing to lose except my pride. Perso

Disclaimer: Not an academic, and my whilst undergrad thesis included code it was so broken that when others saw it I had nothing to lose except my pride. Personally, I would. Open source is a form of peer review, and if you're wanting to stand by your paper as peer-reviewable then I believe the code should be included in that. Generally speaking, I feel more researchers need to open up their code to peer review because generally speaking, research code tends to not have the same robustness against mistakes (through coding convention as well as tests) as professional software development. I shudder to think how many papers have flawed results that no one realises and are just accepted, because no one can spare the effort rebuilding the code from scratch and without any prior reference in order to verify said results. I don't think you need to clean it up. You're not competing for a coding elegance competition, but rather allowing someone to find bugs if they exist and point it out, just as they would peer reviewing your paper. More cynically, spaghetti code probably helps as a defense against people ripping off your code, so if you're worried about your competitive advantage then not cleaning it up is a form of security through obscurity :)