http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101013/f...

Important excerpts:
-----------------------------------------------------------

"Programs written by scientists may be small scripts to draw charts and calculate correlations, trends and significance, larger routines to process and filter data in more complex ways, or telemetry software to control or acquire data from lab or field equipment. Often they are an awkward mix of these different parts, glued together with piecemeal scripts. What they have in common is that, after a paper's publication, they often languish in an obscure folder or are simply deleted. Although the paper may include a brief mathematical description of the processing algorithm, it is rare for science software to be published or even reliably preserved."

....

"So, openness improved both the code used by the scientists and the ability of the public to engage with their work. This is to be expected. Other scientific methods improve through peer review. The open-source movement has led to rapid improvements within the software industry. But science source code, not exposed to scrutiny, cannot benefit in this way."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

The "No excuses" section is just Great !!

Notable excerpts:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Excuse #3:

"The code is valuable intellectual property that belongs to my institution."

"Really, that little MATLAB routine to calculate a two-part fit is worth money? Frankly, I doubt it. Some code may have long-term commercial potential, but almost all the value lies in your expertise. My industry has a name for code not backed by skilled experts: abandonware. Institutions should support publishing; those who refuse are blocking progress.


Excuse #4:

"It is too much work to polish the code."

"For scientists, the word publication is totemic, and signifies perfectionism. But your papers need not include meticulous pages of Fortran; the original code can be published as supplementary information, available from an institutional or journal website."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

And the conclusion couldn't be better:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Governments, agencies and funding bodies have all called for transparency. To make it happen, they have to be prepared to make the necessary policy changes, and to pay for training, workshops and initiatives. But the most important change must come in the attitude of scientists. If you are still hesitant about releasing your code, then ask yourself this question: does it perform the algorithm you describe in your paper? If it does, your audience will accept it, and maybe feel happier with its own efforts to write programs. If not, well, you should fix that anyway"

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Full Article at:

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101013/f...