Most researchers make their source code publicly available upon publication
the verdict
REFUTED
the evidence says no
refutedsupported
the weight of evidence
0 sources for · 1 against
Evidence from a study on source code sharing practices indicates that the majority of authors publishing computational research do not make their source code publicly available.
While software and algorithms have become increasingly important in astronomy, the majority of authors who publish computational astronomy research do not share the source code they develop, making it difficult to replicate and reuse the work. In this paper we discuss the importance of sharing scientific source code with the entire astrophysics community, and propose that journals require authors to make their code publicly available when a paper is published. That is, we suggest that a paper that involves a computer program not be accepted for publication unless the source code becomes publicly available. The adoption of such a policy by editors, editorial boards, and reviewers will improve the ability to replicate scientific results, and will also make the computational astronomy methods more available to other researchers who wish to apply them to their data.