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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?

#351

Post by goodpoint »

skrebbel wrote: post #305
goodpoint wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clearly communicate intent Again, this is not how a license work. You can express your intents, ideas and desires in a README file and in many other ways. The license is nothing more than a contract that provides rights to the recipient under certain conditions. Standing up in court is its real power and only purpose. That's why we should prefer licenses that stood up in court and have been written by lawyers rathe…

I strongly disagree. Contracts very much primarily communicate intent, ideally in such a way that they also stand up in court. People regularly argue over details in contracts, people regularly look up things in contracts, also when there is no court to be seen and no intention anywhere to go to court. The vast vast vast majority of contracts never make it to court. Plenty of contracts aren't even written down. When…

> Plenty of contracts aren't even written down.

That's a well known fact. And it's besides the point.

> Lawyers like you to think that but it's not true.

Is that a conspiracy theory? Writing long, detailed contracts on a persistent medium is safer: it lowers the risk of he-said-she-said scenarios and ambiguities.

That is meant to save you tons of legal expenses.

> No scientist is gonna sue another scientist

Then there is no need for such license in the first place. Just a readme file.

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

#354

Post by bumby »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #131

Emphatically YES. Put the code on GitHub. It doesn't have to be perfect. Especially if it will take two months for someone to "get it right" from the paper. I've been involved in projects where we were trying to reproduce results from some paper both with code and without. The description of an algorithm in a paper can sometimes be unclear, often reading the code makes the description in the paper much clearer. In th…

I agree with you but have found the data is much harder because organizations are so sensitive to that risk. Even though it can be anonymized, many don’t even want to allow it.

Absurd anecdote: I had a coworker who tried to present healthcare data from their research. They attempted to anonymize it humorously with names and SSN like “Mickey Mouse 123-45-678”. They were told them they couldn’t share the data on the chance somebody might actually have those name/SSN combinations

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

#355

Post by maxnoe »

That you were allowed to publish the paper without the code is the core problem here.

You shouldn't even be able to ask this question. The journal should have required you to first or along with the paper publish the code.

Unfortunately, the number of Journals that do this is still small and even the ones that do sometimes are even satisfied with a "Code can be obtained upon request".

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

#356

Post by tjs8rj »

andrewzah wrote: post #258
TremendousJudge wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never thought about this, but it's right. However, to get more nitpicky, most of the uses of "Comput[er|ing] Science" should be replaced with "Computer Engineering" anyway. If you are building something for a company, you are doing engineering, not science research

The average developer isn't often doing "engineering". Until we have actual standards and a certification process, "engineer[ing]" doesn't mean anything. The average software developer doesn't even know much math. Right now, "software engineer" basically means "has a computer, -perhaps- knows a little bit about what goes on under the hood".

Engineering is something like “deliberately configuring a physical or technological process to achieve some intended effect”. That applies whether you’re building a bridge or writing fizzbuzz

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

#357

Post by HenrikB »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #113
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…

I think this could be done much better by putting a very restrictive license like GPLv3 / AGPL and then in the README putting in that I don't support this project at all and ignore everything associated with wherever you are hosting it. Using this license would actually make me suspect that your results aren't even valid and I don't trust many experiments that don't release source code.

In case OP, and others don't know, it is the copyright holders that can decide on the license. Copyright holders are the persons who contributed to the code. In this case, it sounds like OP is the sole author and therefore the sole copyright holder.

You cannot change the past, but as a copyright holder, you can always set a new license for future releases.

Thus, OP, if you're uncertain, I definitely was when I started out, go with a restrive license as recommended here (GPL). That, together with publishing the code online (e.g. GitHub, Gitlab, ...) as well as a with your article, will give you some protection against plagiarism. Anyone who use include parts of your code for their research code, will have to share theirs code the same. If you later on feel like you want to relax the license, you can always change it to, say, MIT.

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

#358

Post by bee_rider »

kragen wrote: post #347
inanutshellus wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the license is to set your expectations as low as possible. Then, when you actually /do/ get support, you'll be ecstatic rather than non-plussed.

Discarding a request for support with extreme prejudice might entail using LinkedIn to look up the boss of the person who asked you for support, then phoning them up to complain about the request for support, or it might entail filing for a restraining order against the person requestings support. The point of this clause is to intimidate people out of making the request in the first place.

That's a pretty over the top reading.

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

#359

Post by lr1970 »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #271
paulluuk wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't call it "Computer Science" for nothing ;)

notoriously Philip Wadler says that computer science has two problems: computer and science. It's not about computers and "You don't put science on your name if you're a real science" He prefers the name informatics. source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IOiZatlZtGU

> It's not about computers and "You don't put science on your name if you're a real science"

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - Edsger W. Dijkstra [0], [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Computer_science

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

#360

Post by kragen »

bee_rider wrote: post #358
kragen wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discarding a request for support with extreme prejudice might entail using LinkedIn to look up the boss of the person who asked you for support, then phoning them up to complain about the request for support, or it might entail filing for a restraining order against the person requestings support. The point of this clause is to intimidate people out of making the request in the first place.

That's a pretty over the top reading.

You should probably familiarize yourself with the meaning of the phrases it's alluding to, "dismissed with extreme prejudice" and "terminated with extreme prejudice".
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