Kind of a...non-statement? Like "well, we strongly prefer when folks include open source, but this was neat and we want to be able to publish cool work, soooo...?"
It's a statement that their so-called requirement that "Authors are required to make materials, data, code, and associated protocols promptly available to readers without undue qualifications." is actually just a suggestion.
It's a statement that their requirement that papers pass a peer review stage is just a suggestion, you don't actually have to provide information to the reviewers that would be necessary for them to review the work.
If your pockets are deep enough and/or your work is compelling enough, you can ignore those requirements. In modern society, that seems obvious, but people like to think that academia is ideologically motivated and immune to this kind of thing.
"The private sector funds most global research and development, and many of the results of such work are not published in peer-reviewed journals."
I read this as:
Given the option of publishing pseudocode and not publishing at all, Nature is willing to accept the first.
and
Google would likely not have published if we required full transparency, and having them publish is more beneficial. (and this paper is impactful enough that it is worth making an exemption for.)
And in my opinion:
People are asking too much of Alphabet. Alphabet could easily choose not to publish anything. To be honest, I'm shocked that they do publish.
They aren't doing it out of the goodness of their heart, they're doing it because it benefits them to. If they want to have those benefits they should be held to the same standards as everyone else.
Giving Google special rules flies in the face of the scientific process. Nature needs to have one, consistent set of rules, as their stamp of approval is what Google wants and they got it without giving up anything in return.
This is a shameful perversion of the peer review process and the paper should be retracted.
Yeah, no. No one would be working at Alphabet if they didn't publish this work. Which means the work would never get done to begin with.
Would you rather publish or work on the cutting edge?
On the other hand, even in academy, scientific articles are not always the best examples of open and reproducible research [2,3]. And in computer science, it is common for articles to be more focused on algorithms than on implementations.
[1]: https://deepmind.google/impact/meet-the-scientists-using-alp...