Can confirm that most of the times when reproducing/implementing a paper or trying to extend it to another field, researchers are pretty OK (some very enthusiastic) to chat over email about it. As long as you've actually read the paper(s) or read the code (if any), and there's no expected free-work...

I sometimes get unpublished artefacts (matlab/python/fortran code, data samples) just by... asking nicely, showing interest. And I'm not even in academia or a lab.