"The gist of the article is to urge readers to reconsider current attitudes about sharing code related to publications by pondering an “alternative universe” in which mathematics
papers are not expected to contain the proofs of theorems. Many of the objections I hear repeatedly to sharing code can be applied to such a universe.[...]
4. Giving the proof to my competitors would be unfair to me.
It took years to prove this theorem, and the same idea can be used to prove other theorems. I should be able to publish at least 5 more papers before sharing the proof. If I share it now my competitors can use the ideas in it without having to do any work, and perhaps without even giving me credit since they won’t have to reveal their proof technique in their papers."
> We need a faster, more flexible, albeit official way of sharing data.
Metajournals are trying to do it, with an "Article" overlay to data/software publication : http://metajnl.com/. IPOL also tries to publish image processing software: http://www.ipol.im/. And there is also some work to interlink science assets (more than articles) on http://linkedscience.org/.
\
I welcome publication models not based on "PDF standard" (ie an electronic clone of the centuries-old ink&paper text article), but simply sharing data/software is not sufficient. I think it is important to have an editorial line and a peer review, otherwise anything online would qualify as scientific communication.
Moreover, software and data is hardly sufficient by itself; it needs to be explained, documented, illustrated and discussed to be more than a "harddisk dump".
> Absent funding agencies and journals insisting on code release and the moral argument of reproducibility, what incentives would help convince code authors to release their software?
It could also be the pressure of colleagues who, as anonymous reviewers, would always ask for the code whenever a paper depends on computation. Journal policies will not switch to REQUIRING the code anytime soon, but peer-review can add some pressure.
"The gist of the article is to urge readers to reconsider current attitudes about sharing code related to publications by pondering an “alternative universe” in which mathematics papers are not expected to contain the proofs of theorems. Many of the objections I hear repeatedly to sharing code can be applied to such a universe.[...]
4. Giving the proof to my competitors would be unfair to me. It took years to prove this theorem, and the same idea can be used to prove other theorems. I should be able to publish at least 5 more papers before sharing the proof. If I share it now my competitors can use the ideas in it without having to do any work, and perhaps without even giving me credit since they won’t have to reveal their proof technique in their papers."