| |||||||||||||
No code neededNo code neededPosted May 24, 2012 8:35 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)In reply to: No code needed by southey Parent article: A scientific basis for Open Source Software
Finally, there is one of the most important components, competitive edge. Grant money is essential and I am NOT going to help someone using my code beat me to the same grant!Shameful. Instead of advancing the state of the art we are back to Alchemy, but with software as the secret ingredient that nobody else must have. Just replace "code" with "formula" or "reaction" in the above. Only for this reason public research grants should mandate publication of the code bases under free licenses. The days where a few equations were enough to reproduce someone else's results are long gone in too many fields.
(Log in to post comments)
No code needed Posted May 24, 2012 14:49 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
These motivations are understandable and they are regrettable. In any event a scientific paper should detail all of the analysis in sufficient detail that it can be reproduced. I wouldn't say source code would be required but certainly sufficient detail to re-implement any tools would be required. For sufficient analysis complexity maybe the source code would be the best documentation. One worry I have is the same as for electronic elections, what does it really mean if you just rerun the same tools and it spits out a number, any errors in the analysis will be faithfully reproduced which I think would impede scientific understanding.
No code needed Posted May 24, 2012 15:17 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
It seems to me that in a study of this kind there are two aspects to reproducibility: the raw data, and the analysis performed by the software. By including both the raw data and the actual software used in the original study, you make it possible to check each part separately. Without the original software, it's difficult to say whether any differences in the processed results are due to problems with the original software, problems with the reimplementation, or differences in the input.
Having the original software for comparison also makes it easier to guarantee that the results can be reproduced with a different _style_ of implementation; otherwise, not knowing how the original software was implemented, you might end up recreating it the same way, with the same built-in flaws. If the software is included you can deliberately choose a different approach.
No code needed Posted May 24, 2012 15:35 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] There is also gradual improvement of results, which has been a tenet of science for many centuries. A first researcher publishes their basic results, a second researcher publishes their enhancements, the next one publishes a refinement in certain conditions... In these days of computer simulations it becomes essential to have both data and software, as you say, and improve on them gradually. Otherwise research papers become just a lot of hand-waving around estimations and algorithms.
|
|||||||||||||