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I work as a bioinformatician (programmer in genomics), a typical paper may involve a dozen sequencing samples (~25G each), and a few thousand lines of scripts t

I work as a bioinformatician (programmer in genomics), a typical paper may involve a dozen sequencing samples (~25G each), and a few thousand lines of scripts to produce CSVs/graphs When I started my lab head got a request for an old paper (before my time) and I had to hunt down the data, put it on the web, find the code, send an email etc - it was a lot of work, almost as much as just sharing it in the first place. So now all the code goes up on GitHub, all the sequencing reads to public archives, and we fill the supps full of any intermediate CSVs etc we think people might find useful. I saw it as "people bothering me so I would do admin" but some lab heads see being requested as "strategic networking and being informed about other research in the field" where they can see what others are doing and gain collaborations / be put onto papers etc I guess it's just expectations: I've met surgeons who have the expectation that because they kept a piece of tumor from a surgery and gave it to a lab, they will be on any paper that ever uses data from that tissue until the end of time (even on labs on the other side of the world re-using the same data). When I'm collecting public data, I usually don't bother to ask due to the hassle, and move straight on to the actually public stuff. My bet is that papers with public code/data are used/cited way more often, but the tradeoff is probably their authors get less total papers over all. Do you want a larger number of people slightly happy with you or a fewer number of "close friends" in your area who may look kindly on you for grants or paper reviews.

aeonik 4y ago
I think paper citations are an archaic method of tracking contributions to research. We have all this technology, and Git is a great example, that allows us to more granularly give credit to contributors. In fact, even the very idea of a published paper feels out of date. Why have one model that is set in stone that is published as one snapshot in time? In the DevOps and Cybersecurity world our alerting mechanisms are essentially simple data models (sometimes not so simple) that are tapped into the raw data feeds, and can be updated and refined on an ongoing basis. While instrumenting the physical world can have more challenges, I still feel that the sciences have a lot to be gained from some of the more "pedestrian" operational processes that we use in the technology industry.

aeonik 4y ago

I think paper citations are an archaic method of tracking contributions to research. We have all this technology, and Git is a great example, that allows us to more granularly give credit to contributors. In fact, even the very idea of a published paper feels out of date. Why have one model that is set in stone that is published as one snapshot in time? In the DevOps and Cybersecurity world our alerting mechanisms are essentially simple data models (sometimes not so simple) that are tapped into the raw data feeds, and can be updated and refined on an ongoing basis. While instrumenting the physical world can have more challenges, I still feel that the sciences have a lot to be gained from some of the more "pedestrian" operational processes that we use in the technology industry.