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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?

#121

Post by ur-whale »

goodpoint wrote: post #101
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.

> This is not what licenses are for!!

You must be fun at parties :)

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

#124

Post by troutwine »

This is a question near to my heart. I'm not an academic but a practicing systems software engineer. A good chunk of my work is sourcing interesting academic ideas and trying to turn them into practically useful software. Papers that don't release their source code are often not as reproducible as the authors think. Perhaps there's a bug that the results depend on, perhaps the implementation is very specific to the context the software runs in, perhaps the paper gives _most_ of what you'd need to re-implement but the fine details are missing. I've seen them all.

In a very real sense unless the paper has a result that's so compelling I can't ignore it if there's no published source code -- even if it's an obvious prototype! -- I'll pass it by. I'm not alone in that in my line of work. Industry folks might also be more willing to accept prototype code than academic folks, I dunno.

Worth consider, I guess, if you're interested in your work crossing the academic/industry boundary smoothly.

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

#125

Post by whatever1 »

Publish your code only after you have made the journal publications / conference papers. I have witnessed a researcher getting robbed of his work when another researcher took his almost complete code from github and submitted faster to a journal for publication.

Now both of the researchers have to be cited, but only one of them did the discovery work.

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

#126

Post by jonnycomputer »

jaclaz wrote: post #23

As always I may be wrong, but the (admittedly very few) times I find an article/paper based or revolving around code that is interesting/useful for some purposes I read the "code is available on request" (or similar) as the (in-) famous Fermat's Last theorem note: Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet. Nowadays margins are large enough and cost nothing or next to nothing, and you don't probably have any other use of yo…

NDA requires you to share data several months after reporting it. But in many cases, data collection has not even completed by then. Theoretically someone could scoop you by analyzing your data before all data collection is completed (e.g. N=100, instead of N=120). I'd think that would be career suicide if it were found out, but the risk of it happening doesn't exactly provide much of a incentive to make it any easier on them.

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

#128

Post by inetknght »

Your code should have exactly the same license and distribution as your paper. Anyone who tells you different is simply wrong.

If you published a paper that uses information from the code then yes you absolutely must publish your code. Otherwise you're contributing to the decline of science via the opaqueness of papers and irreproducibility problem.

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

#129

Post by jll29 »

goodpoint wrote: post #101
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.

For instance, the Java license explicitly forbids the use in/for real-time critical systems, and such limitations are good to stress in a license so that they may reach legal force, also to protect the author(s).

Incidentally, I've seen people violate the Java "no realtime" clause.

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

#130

Post by jonnycomputer »

nicec2 wrote: post #6

Two times I have published my research code - both times I have found many other papers/projects plagiarized my work without giving me any credit. This happens way more than you would think, especially if you are working under less known advisor, and at less known university. As the other comment said, if you care about "advancing the science", and won't mind stuff like the above happening, then go for it. In my expe…

I wonder how often it is the case that code isn't considered an academic product per se, and so free to use. May have to make it very explicit.
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