Ready to be published? LXer is read by around 350,000 individuals each month, and is an excellent place for you to publish your ideas, thoughts, reviews, complaints, etc. Do you have something to say to the Linux community?
Phys.org is reporting on a recently published paper that suggests all scientific journals should require the full disclosure of source code as a condition of publication. The paper states that only 3 science journals currently require source code.
Open Source Science
The paper makes some very good points. It makes the argument that, as computers play an increasingly important role in scientific research, the code those computers run should be just as open as any other part of the experiment. For other scientists to be able to reproduce the results and improve on the work, they need to have access to all of the materials used. Withholding the source code is akin to censoring out part of the research: it prevents others from continuing where the original research left off.
This is, of course, the exact reasoning behind free software licenses such as the GPL. Work on one project should be easily applied to all others, and anyone who benefits from that work must give back any improvements or changes they made. This principle has worked brilliantly well for web servers, browsers, and operating systems, so why not for science?
The Phys.org report then goes on to comment on an issue that is all too familiar:
The basic principle of science is reproducibility (or otherwise).
Instead of obtaining source code the other scientists should reproduce (or otherwise) the scientific results by writing their own software.
This serves as an additional check and in fact is what normally happens.
Trudging through someone else's source code to reproduce their results is not the way science happens. This is a misconception of someone who is not a scientist
Quoting:Q. Was Timsort accepted and added into OpenJDK?
A. Yes.
...
Q. Did Sun ever say anything about Timsort?
A. Yes, Mark Reinhold praised it for its speed on his blog.
Sometimes, a new pair of eyes can make all the difference.
Post a comment
A free account is needed to post. Write your comment here first: your text is kept in this browser while you sign up or log in, and is waiting for you when you come back.
Your message:
|||||
10
Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, [text](https://link), - lists, > quotes, $x^2$ for math. Formatting help
Instead of obtaining source code the other scientists should reproduce (or otherwise) the scientific results by writing their own software.
This serves as an additional check and in fact is what normally happens.
Trudging through someone else's source code to reproduce their results is not the way science happens. This is a misconception of someone who is not a scientist