2 ms·

As always I may be wrong, but the (admittedly very few) times I find an article/paper based or revolving around code that is interesting/useful for some purpose

by jaclaz 5y ago

As always I may be wrong, but the (admittedly very few) times I find an article/paper based or revolving around code that is interesting/useful for some purposes I read the "code is available on request" (or similar) as the (in-) famous Fermat's Last theorem note: Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet. Nowadays margins are large enough and cost nothing or next to nothing, and you don't probably have any other use of your code, so what would be the advantage for you in not publishing it? What kind of competitive advantage does it give to you? (what many scientists think might be not as relevant as what you think about this "competitive advantage" secifically in your specific case/field) About "cleaning it", why? I mean, if as-is it works (but it is "ugly") it still works, what if in the process of "cleaning it" you manage to introduce a bug of some kind? Unless you plan to also re-test it after the cleaning, I guess it would be better to not clean it at all.

michaelt 5y ago
> What kind of competitive advantage does it give to you? For every paper introducing the revolutionary Algorithm X, there are a bunch of follow-up papers like "Algorithm X applied to self-driving cars", "Algorithm X applied to smartphones", "Algorithm X with some tweaks that provide marginal improvements", "Algorithm X but using consumer-grade hardware" and so on. If every other lab has to spend several months to replicate your first paper, you and your colleagues can spam out the follow-up papers before anyone else can catch up. This makes your publication count go up. Other means for achieving similar effects include delaying the publication of your code, or releasing undocumented spaghetti-code with missing dependencies and entirely comprised of one-character variable names. Of course, this stuff comes at a cost: Making it harder for people to use your work makes them less likely to use your work. So it might be better for your citation count to release the code - and in any case, who goes into research hoping their ideas will be ignored?.
jonnycomputer 5y ago
NDA requires you to share data several months after reporting it. But in many cases, data collection has not even completed by then. Theoretically someone could scoop you by analyzing your data before all data collection is completed (e.g. N=100, instead of N=120). I'd think that would be career suicide if it were found out, but the risk of it happening doesn't exactly provide much of a incentive to make it any easier on them.

by jaclaz 5y ago

michaelt 5y ago

> What kind of competitive advantage does it give to you? For every paper introducing the revolutionary Algorithm X, there are a bunch of follow-up papers like "Algorithm X applied to self-driving cars", "Algorithm X applied to smartphones", "Algorithm X with some tweaks that provide marginal improvements", "Algorithm X but using consumer-grade hardware" and so on. If every other lab has to spend several months to replicate your first paper, you and your colleagues can spam out the follow-up papers before anyone else can catch up. This makes your publication count go up. Other means for achieving similar effects include delaying the publication of your code, or releasing undocumented spaghetti-code with missing dependencies and entirely comprised of one-character variable names. Of course, this stuff comes at a cost: Making it harder for people to use your work makes them less likely to use your work. So it might be better for your citation count to release the code - and in any case, who goes into research hoping their ideas will be ignored?.

jonnycomputer 5y ago

NDA requires you to share data several months after reporting it. But in many cases, data collection has not even completed by then. Theoretically someone could scoop you by analyzing your data before all data collection is completed (e.g. N=100, instead of N=120). I'd think that would be career suicide if it were found out, but the risk of it happening doesn't exactly provide much of a incentive to make it any easier on them.