You can endorse or discuss Science Code Manifesto published this week at http://sciencecodemanifesto.org/
Software is a cornerstone of science. Without software, twenty-first century science would be impossible. Without better software, science cannot progress.
But the culture and institutions of science have not yet adjusted to this reality. We need to reform them to address this challenge, by adopting these five principles:
- Code
- All source code written specifically to process data for a published paper must be available to the reviewers and readers of the paper.
- Copyright
- The copyright ownership and license of any released source code must be clearly stated.
- Citation
- Researchers who use or adapt science source code in their research must credit the codes creators in resulting publications.
- Credit
- Software contributions must be included in systems of scientific assessment, credit, and recognition.
- Curation
- Source code must remain available, linked to related materials, for the useful lifetime of the publication.
Nick Barnes, the author of the Manifesto, explains its creation as follows:
I wrote it for the Climate Code Foundation, initially as a response and contribution to the Royal Societys policy study on Science as a Public Enterprise. It is partly inspired by the Panton Principles, a bold statement of ideals in scientific data sharing. It refines the ideas I laid out in an opinion piece for Nature in 2010.
However, I did not originate these ideas. They are simply extensions of the core principle of science: publication. Publication is what distinguishes science from alchemy, and is what has propelled science and human society so far and so fast in the last 300 years. The Manifesto is the natural application of this principle to the relatively new, and increasingly important, area of science software.
My own ideals, influenced by the Free and Open Source Software movement, go beyond those stated in the Manifesto: I believe that Open Source publication of all science software will be one outcome of the current revolution in scientific methods, a revolution in which I hope this Manifesto will play a part.
Well my personal viewpoints are fairly copyleft, I want to play devil’s advocate here for a second and highlight some points that were made on the AGU Linked-in Forum
1. The author might be reluctant to share because their code might be workable but needs clean-up and documenting to be readable.
2. Copyright: Most journals require you to turn over copyright to them, With the text of an article this isn’t as big of a deal as it is with working code.
3. Including Code adds a burden to the peer review process.
4. Data, What if the dataset used was too large to reasonably distribute? What about proprietary data? your much more likely to get a corporation to approved 2-3 screen-shots then an entire cube.
5. Competition, if a journal requires the code to be released it might discourage commercial entities from publishing as it would allow competitors a chance to catch up faster.
———-
Here’s my pie in the sky Idea, What’s really needed is a new open access journal. The copyright would be fluid, With the minimum of the owner granting a enduring use license; but strongly suggesting a creative commons license.
Papers would be ranked in to several categories:
1. Unreviewed papers, Authors who didn’t pass the peer review process could resubmit to this section.
2. Peer reviewed section without code or data.
3. Peer reviewed with data and code available to the reviewer
4. Peer reviewed with Code and Data available.
This structure would allow you to sort the academic papers in class 4 from the sales pitches in class 2 and 3. Also Class 1 would let you get the occasional gems without muzzling the crackpots, but at least give you a way to filter them out.