When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I refer to what I think the author is asking for, as "push button reproducibility," i.e., the idea

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I refer to what I think the author is asking for, as "push button reproducibility," i.e., the idea that the results will reproduce themselves at the push of a button, anywhere, at any time in the future. I have a couple of misgivings about this. First, the whole idea of "open" research predates computer technology. Forcing science to keep up with the latest ideas in software distribution is too much of a burden, when science is already too risky and slow. I had the odd privilege of learning the scientific method from my mom, before there was widespread access to computers. Her version was that a study should be reproducible by a reasonably skilled person. This is a greatly relaxed standard, but is realistic for a discipline that spans decades if not centuries. I supplied all of the data and code for my thesis research (and a sufficient number of mechanical and electrical drawings). But nobody has Turbo Pascal today, and some of the commercial instruments such as specialized lasers were already obsolete by the time I finished. Also, the experiment was dangerous, and might not pass safety review today. It required about $500k of equipment and a dedicated lab. Today I have the luxury of saying that if my code fails upon loading a new version of a dependency, the person who discovers that failure is probably skilled enough to fix it, and my work rarely hinges on the idiosyncracies of dependency versions. If it goes into a product, they'll totally rewrite it anyway. Second, science is still at its core an experimental discipline. Even in physics, there are more experimentalists than theoreticians. Reproducibility means roll up your shirt sleeves and head for the lab. To this day, some processes have not been mechanized, and you still need to spend years developing "lab hands" which not all people succeed at. I think there's a clue in the fact that the social and medical sciences seem to be the most deeply embroiled in the reproducibility crisis. It's because the quality of results depends on the the quality of measurements, and it's just harder when dealing with living subjects or one-of-a-kind specimens (such as the earth's climate). In fact, not much more than a century ago, it was believed that studying those things was beyond the reach of scientific methodology. Third, we're not going to stop doing science in areas where it's hard, particularly in medicine, but we're also not going to staff up in areas such as software development, to make science work better. People are suffering from disease right now so there's always an urgency to finding cures, plus an obvious profit motive. Disclosure: Experimental physicist, developing better measurement equipment.