Is there a niche out there for the GitHub of science? My cofounder (mikeknoop on HN) puts a lot of his scholarly research code stuffs on GitHub, but perhaps a more specialized place with emphasis on peer review would be more appropriate.
The Galaxy project does a great job of trying to foster such an environment:
Where I work (government research lab) people think of Subversion as a sporadic backup target, typically doing a commit every month or so, despite making frequent changes to operational code.
Paradoxically, one scientist I spoke to was scared about overwriting code if he did an incorrect commit, but he's perfectly happy to have mycode.py, mycode2.py, mycode_this_one_works.py, mycode_this_one_works3.py, ...