Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

Depends on the field. Let's assume you are not in math /CS/Physics

What can go "wrong"

- Someone may find a minor rounding error and now you have to issue a correction to the paper which, laudable as it is, is a bad thing

- You 'll end up having to maintain an open-source-something and possibly forks

- Your open source code may end up as a github repo in which you are just one of the contributors, not the owner and others are leeching credit from u

- People who want to criticise you will find excuses in the coding style.

Research code is messy -- it must be messy imho, or else it's probably insignificant. People who don't publish it are definitely shielded by the obscurity , while i have received scrutiny for entirely inconsequential details. You can choose to publish it in a less accessible way , which will thwart people with bad intentions. Even publishing it as a tarball in a web server is enough work to keep them away.

Isn't it worse for everyone if the paper but not the code is published and somebody doesn't find the error?

The world suffers for acting off of untrue information, and eventually the author suffers for having been wrong all this time.

I agree, and of course it is. But the underlying issue here is that paper production is the wrong way to do science, there simply isn't enough attention to validate all those papers

That's a good point. However, it suggests to me that one should publish the code for an additional reason:

1) if we acknowledge that paper production is the wrong way to do science, perhaps papers with attached published code are a step in the right direction. A critical mass of papers that are easy to reproduce because anyone can execute the code attached with them could, hypothetically, come to dominate the zeitgeist and push out papers with grandiose but unverified claims.

Here is an incentive they could use: If a paper publishes the code it used, they can be allowed to skip the methods section about it. Describing code with words is at best awkward and usually error prone as people forget to update the text.

To be clear in my field the journals require publishing the code, but in my experience the code that gets reused gets more scrutiny, often without benefit to the researcher.

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