In my opinion this is a quite
absurd discussion. Having the ability to make code transparent for others to
reuse and build on top of is obviously way better for science than having black
boxes. It is not needed to provide the ability to the referee (who by definition
is a busy guy) to rerun the calculations, but to the scientific community as a
whole. It may be the time already to reduce the often over-critic referee system
and move to a more open science schema. Repositories for code have been
extremely useful in the past and I think being concerned about the ability of
the scientific community to improve our results is way more positive that
believing that we and only we can run a code and understand its results.
Having myself a foot in enterpreneourship in addition to
academia, I think that closing/selling code is futurless in a world with tens of
thousands of developers ready for better implementations for each new idea. What
makes sense is understanding the possible use of each technology, not closing
them in a useless effort of overprotection.
So, the need for the manifesto is clear. Start opening our
eyes to a wider conception of science, far from egoistic and closed minded uses
of it. The system should follow this, one day or another.
--
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Jordi
Villà i Freixa
Computational Biochemistry and Biophysics lab
Research
Program on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) - IMIM/UPF
Parc de Recerca
Biomèdica de Barcelona
C/ Doctor Aiguader, 88; 08003 Barcelona (Spain)
Tel: +34 93 316 0504 // Fax:
+34 93 316 0550
e-mail:
jvilla|*|imim.es http://cbbl.imim.es