If you can even come close to explaining how to replicate your results in 12 or 20 pages, you're not really doing an experiment that is non-trivial to replicate

If you can even come close to explaining how to replicate your results in 12 or 20 pages, you're not really doing an experiment that is non-trivial to replicate. Constraining science to protocols that can be explained in 12-20 pages would be stupid and wrong; almost any protocol used in a modern lab will take longer to explain than that. With all due respect, the assertion that a typical protocol should be able to fit in the length of a typical CS publication is pure hubris. (And when you need a 200 page TR to explain things, my arguments about unjustified cost start resonating because you're demanding a dissertation or two per published paper.) > such questions did not take half a day to answer. Just because the science you did was trivial to replicate does not mean all science is trivial to replicate. Yeah, when replication involves nothing more or less than compiling code on commodity hardware, I can imagine replication protocols are probably pretty easy to explain... it's a small wonder anyone had to email you about this at all. > "To replicate and check methodology, `darcs clone ...`". However, the assertion that replicating any experiment is basically no more difficult that downloading some source code and compiling/running it is... arrogant in the extreme. It's nice that some Computer Scientists can "replicate" their results by saying "oh yeah compile and run this code on the same dataset". But asserting that all science is like this is underestimating the difficulty of replication even in CS. What happens when your dataset is terabytes in size and requires a specially configured cluster of GPUs or FPGAs to process in the next year? What if you have a half million dollar robot that has to be built to spec? Give me the 12 page IKEA manual for building a half-million dollar robot that has only ever been built once before. Or even the 200 page manual. Not all Computer Science can be done on a laptop, and the assertion that it can is, again, arrogant. Even more to the point, most laboratory experiments are not run entirely by autonomous robots that you can load code into and walk away; in fact, many require steps that require skills in the lab that can only come with lots of practice. Hell, limiting ourselves to protocols that are easy to use and fit in 12-20 pages would ban the contents of upper-level undergraduate lab assignments. There is nothing wrong with an experiment requiring skill to replicate. Banning protocols that are difficult for non-experts to follow for intrinsic reasons would basically ban all modern experimental science.