(edit the "code" I'm talking about is complex stuff like numerical simulations etc, if we were talking about the code used for plotting a simple graph or histogram, that's a different matter--although it wouldn't hurt anyone publishing a full paper open source as a make-file with some TeX sources calling a few plotting libraries)

> But they are presenting the methodology they claim went into the code and allowing you to agree or disagree with the methodology. If you agree, you take their answer--

No. And this is the whole point. You can agree with the methodology, but as long as you haven't inspected the code, you cannot just accept they actually implemented it right!

In fact, chances are, they probably didn't. The best programmers white buggy and incorrect code. And from what I've seen in the field of physics, scientific code is everything but an exception to that. I'd be surprised if it was very different for astrophysics.

So by publishing the methodology and the results, but not the code, they put up a nice show. But that's it, not reproducible. So all that's really brought to the table is the methodology and some "say-so" results that nobody can check are accurate.