Academia isn't flawless, it's no paradise. It's just humans and their factions, with all the good and bad that brings.

> The authors are ... constrained by space due to paper limitations

This is very real. Different journals have different criteria: word count; formatting; the number of tables you're permitted to include; etc. It's archaic and daft but that's the truth of it. And that's before we even get started on the really bonkers stuff like author order, impact factor, reviewer workload vs lack of pay, publish or perish, and so on.

Yes, this was a huge disappointment when I read Chemistry & Physics years ago. The naive view of papers was that they were to move human knowledge forward, but it became clear they were an elaborate knowledge withholding device!

Fortunately the trend seems to be towards better levels of openness, but it varies by subject. Stories like the BASF team being unable to reproduce vast numbers of established published techniques are way too common.

I tried to make use of some public audio research and it was pretty bad. There was an audio comprehensibility competition a few years ago. Some of the papers submitted are still around, as well as the summary paper describing the results. But many papers are hard to find, and those that claimed to have source code available are hard to find --- i was able to get matlab sources for a few algorithms, but they somehow work on the example files, but mostly crash on my files.

It's a shame because I understand the idea of the paper, and have an excellent place to apply it, but I lack the DSP background, so I can't really rebuild the code from scratch -- so the work is not able to be used.

Yes it's common that a lot of "little details" are left out. Yes it does make things harder. No it's not a big enough problem that you need to be disheartened. You could even see it as an opportunity to raise the bar and stand out positively.

welcome to earth. we apologize for the mess.