It's surprising how few Computer Science papers release code as well. I don't care if it's platform-specific and it requires ridiculous numbers of obscure libraries and only operates on proprietary data that you can't release. I don't care, I want the code to be open-source. I want to see what you did, and whether I believe that it does what you claim it does in the paper.
Where possible, I open-source everything I try to be published. There's only one project I haven't (a scraper for the WoW Armory), but even then I released the library I built for it.
There's no excuse to not do so. Unless you have something to hide.
There's no excuse to not do so. Unless you have something to hide.
Not true, for the same reason that commercial ventures don't like to release source code even if they don't have something to hide.
Having a capable computer code can be a substantial competitive advantage and make it possible to do studies no one else can. While this is less than desirable from the standpoint of science, it's perfectly understandable given the career pressures that individual scientists operate under.
This creates a conflict of interests though. Is the research legit or has it been "enhanced" to help a business venture the researcher has in the works?
Oh, for sure. But I wasn't even talking about any business ventures (those are rare in astrophysics...) but more about keeping your code under wraps to prevent others from benefiting from your hard work. Especially, when (as I said in another post), code development is not especially beneficial for your career.
Though it's hard to find a situation where people don't have a (short-term) incentive to make their work look good. One can hope it will catch up with them in the long run, but more likely by then they have a new job (and, in academics, tenure) that will never hear about their past shoddy work.
The solution is to make peer reviewed code produced for a paper be considered equivalent to a paper in tenure decisions. And for all papers in peer reviewed journals that do computer analysis to be backed up by peer reviewed, published code.
That makes code development beneficial for your career, gives an incentive to not keep it under wraps, improves quality, and is likely to reduce the number of published incorrect results.
Of course that is a pipe dream at this point, but what's wrong with dreaming?
I haven't released source for either of the projects I've released so far in graduate school because they are attack projects that demonstrate security flaws. It is not so clear that there is "no excuse" not to release them.
Another reason not to release source code is that there might be obvious follow-on work and you want to publish that paper too, rather than help someone else scoop you by giving them your tools.
I could be wrong, but I believe universities share some of the blame. It seems as though most of them are more interested in turning the research into a profit than they're concerned with doing good science.
Where possible, I open-source everything I try to be published. There's only one project I haven't (a scraper for the WoW Armory), but even then I released the library I built for it.
There's no excuse to not do so. Unless you have something to hide.