[dandelion_lover]

As a theoretical physicist doing computer simulations, I am trying to publish all my code whenever possible. However all my coauthors are against that. They say things like "Someone will take this code and use it without citing us", "Someone will break the code, obtain wrong results and blame us", "Someone will demand support and we do not have time for that", "No one is giving away their tools which make their competitive advantage". This is of course all nonsense, but my arguments are ignored.

If you want to help me (and others who agree with me), please sign this petition: https://publiccode.eu. It demands that all publicly funded code must be public.

P.S. Yes, my 10-year-old code is working.

[SilasX]

>"Someone will demand support and we do not have time for that",

Well ... that part isn't nonsense, though I agree it shouldn't be a dealbreaker. And it means we should work towards making such support demands minimal or non-existent via easy containerization.

I note with frustration that even the Docker people, whose entire job is containerization, can get this part wrong. I remember when we containerized our startup's app c. 2015, to the point that you should be able to run it locally just by installing docker and running `docker-compose up`, and it still stopped working within a few weeks (which we found when onboarding new employees), which required a knowledgeable person to debug and re-write.

(They changed the spec for docker-compose so that the new version you'd get when downloading Docker would interpret the yaml to mean something else.)

[onhn]

As a theoretical physicist your results should be reproducible based on the content of your papers, where you should detail/state the methods you use. I would make the argument that releasing code in your position has the potential to be scientifically damaging; if another researcher interested in reproducing your results reads your code, then it is possible their reproduction will not be independent. However they will likely still publish it as such.

[pthread_t]

> "No one is giving away their tools which make their competitive advantage"

This hits close to home. Back in college, I developed software, for a lab, for a project-based class. I put the code up on GitHub under the GPL license (some code I used was licensed under GPL as well), and when the people from the lab found out, they lost their minds. A while later, they submitted a paper and the journal ended up demanding the code they used for analysis. Their solution? They copied and pasted pieces of my project they used for that paper and submitted it as their own work. Of course, they also completely ignored the license.

[bumby]

I’m curious, are dedicated software assurance teams a thing in your research area? Or is quality left up to the primary researchers?

[BeetleB]

> Or is quality left up to the primary researchers?

Individual researchers, and in many disciplines (like physics), there is almost no emphasis on quality.

I left academia a decade ago, but at the time all except one of my colleagues protested when version control was suggested to them. Some of these have code in the 30-40K lines.

[dandelion_lover]

Most of the codes I am developing alone. No one else looks at them ever. My supervisor also develops the code alone and never shows it to anyone (not even members of the group).

In other cases, a couple of other researchers may have a look at my code or continue its development. I worked with 4+ research teams and only saw one professional programmer in one of them helping the development. Never heard about a "dedicated software assurance team".

[throwaway287391]

> I’m curious, are dedicated software assurance teams a thing in your research area?

Are these a thing in any research area? I've heard of exactly one case of an academic lab (one that was easily 99th+ percentile in terms of funding) hiring one software engineer not directly involved in leading a research effort, and when I tell other academics about this they're somewhat incredulous. (I admittedly have a bit of trouble believing it myself -- I can't imagine the incentive to work for low academic pay in an environment where you're inevitably going to feel a sense of inferiority to first year PhD students who think they're hot shit because they're doing "research".)

[Vinnl]

Interestingly each of those arguments also applies to publishing an article describing your work.