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An open letter to the NIH (Bioinformatics.Org)
Bioinformatics.Org has posted
an open letter to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) regarding
the freedom of scientific research materials and related software issues.
"We also wish to take this opportunity to address some related problems with the current publishing model. First, there is often no requirement for the availability of the software used in bioinformatics and related research for results to be published, thus preventing the necessary condition of reproducibility. Not only should the software be available in binary form, but one should also be able to obtain and/or inspect the source code of that software to ensure the accuracy of the results. It is too often the case that a non-public entity has conducted an experiment with its own, proprietary software, making it impossible to independently verify the results."
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An open letter to the NIH (Bioinformatics.Org) Posted Nov 23, 2004 15:40 UTC (Tue) by hazelsct (subscriber, #3659) [Link] I agree completely. I've been arguing within the Materials Science community that accepting publications based on black-box closed-source software with no possibility of verification or reproduction is fundamentally antithetical to science. After all, would they accept a phantom equation, with the promise "trust me, it works"?
I realize that I'm preaching to the converted here, but it's nice to see that a major organization is pitching this heavily to the NIH.
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