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Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

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Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#101

Post by goodpoint »

del82 wrote: post #25

> it's substantially more work to clean and organize the code for publishing, it will increase the surface for nitpicking and criticism (e.g. coding style, etc). Matt Might has a solution for this that I love: Don't clean & organize! Release it under the CRAPL[0], making explicit what everyone understands, viz.: "Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it int…

This is not what licenses are for!! They are not statements about the quality of your work or anything similar.

Use standard and well understood licenses e.g. GPL for code and CC for documentation. The world does not need more license fragmentation.

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#102

Post by circadian »

guy-brush wrote: post #56

In my view and personal experience, the pros outweigh the cons: * You increase the impact of your work and as a consequence also might get more citations. * It's the right thing to do for open and reproducible research. * You can get feedback and improve the method. * You are still the expert on your own code. That someone picks it up, implements an idea that you also had and publishes before you is unlikely. * I nev…

"It's the right thing to do for open and reproducible research."

I think this is the most important reason to do it. Research code is not meant to be perfect as another op said, but it can be instrumental in helping others, including non-academics, understand your research.

I think the sooner it's released the better (assuming you've published and you're not needing to protect any IP.) There's some great advice here: https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/reproducible-research/rep...

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#104

Post by ur-whale »

carterschonwald wrote: post #63
del82 wrote: post #25

> it's substantially more work to clean and organize the code for publishing, it will increase the surface for nitpicking and criticism (e.g. coding style, etc). Matt Might has a solution for this that I love: Don't clean & organize! Release it under the CRAPL[0], making explicit what everyone understands, viz.: "Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it int…

A thousand times this. A working demonstrator of a useful idea that is honest about its limits is so valuable. Mover over most commercial code is garbage! :)

Please do absolutely publish your code.

If only to help people who simply can't read academic papers because it's not a language their brain is wired to parse, but who can read code and will understand your ideas via that medium.

[EDIT]: to go further, I have - more than once - run research code under a debugger (or printf-instrumented it, whichever) to finally be able to get an actual intuitive grasp of the idea presented in the paper.

Once you stare at the actual variables while the code runs, my experience is it speaks to you in a way no equation ever will.

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#105

Post by kesor »

What benefit would you receive if you publish your code? Will that give you some privilege or earn you more money and/or more reputation?

If the answer to the above is no, and it will mostly cost you time and effort. Then don't publish.

If the answer to the above is yes, then consider the return on investment for publishing your code. If you earn more reputation/money/whatever if you publish than what you expenditure on doing the work of publishing, then publish, if not, then don't.

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#106

Post by exdsq »

“Besides, many scientists look at code as a competitive advantage so in this case publishing the code will be removing the competitive advantage.”

While I appreciate this is true, it’s also quite sad. Science shouldn’t be a competitive sport to increase a couple metrics like publications and citations such that useful parts of replicating and extending studies aren’t shared. :(

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#107

Post by ur-whale »

howLongHowLong wrote: post #91

It's sort of funny when the pro list includes "better for science" and there's still a need for a con list. There should be a scientific equivalent to the hypocratic oath; a lot of us laypeople imagine that scientist default to "good for science" and "ease and possibility of replicatability."

Yup.

CS scientific journals should make the bar much higher in that regard: no code? no publish. unless really good excuse.

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#108

Post by anon_123g987 »

guy-brush wrote: post #56

In my view and personal experience, the pros outweigh the cons: * You increase the impact of your work and as a consequence also might get more citations. * It's the right thing to do for open and reproducible research. * You can get feedback and improve the method. * You are still the expert on your own code. That someone picks it up, implements an idea that you also had and publishes before you is unlikely. * I nev…

> It's the right thing to do for open and reproducible research.

Everybody here talks about how publishing code helps (or even makes possible) reproducibility, but this is not true, on the contrary, it hinders it. Reproducing the results does not mean running the same code as the author and plotting the same figures as in the paper. This is trivial and good for nothing. Reproduction is other researchers independently reimplementing the code using only the published theory, and getting the same results. If the author publishes the code, no one will bother with this, and this is bad for science.

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#110

Post by petters »

> Besides, many scientists look at code as a competitive advantage so in this case publishing the code will be removing the competitive advantage.

One of my most cited papers is a relatively uninteresting one we wrote for a conference competition. But we have code so it is easy to compare your alternative approach to us. That means citations.

So it can work for your benefit as well.

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