[joeclark77]

I suppose it depends on why the academic is writing code. I've written simulations for social science research -- basically to extrapolate the results of certain decision making strategies by an idealized decision maker in a toy problem. The theory is the subject, not the code. Many people who read my paper will not be programmers able to critique the code, and few will care whether it follows best practices. I've made it open source (https://github.com/joeclark-phd/bandito) because I think it's a good practice to promote, but I'm kind of an oddball. When I was studying other well-known simulation papers, I found their models were incompletely described and I had to contact the original authors to get implementation details in order to replicate them. This is a lot like the problem of data sharing -- all academics should be willing to share their data in order to prove that their results are as reported, but it's not an easily enforceable principle.

If you are talking about computer science academics, of course, that's a horse of a different color. In that case, the code is the topic, so I would guess that they're providing it! On the other hand, the majority of such research is probably solving niche problems and special cases, so it may not be very usable in your professional coding.