Allow me to be drastic here.
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.
2011/10/17 Pedro Silva pedros^ufp.edu.pt <owner-chemistry(!)ccl.net>
Sent to CCL by: Pedro Silva [pedros(_)ufp.edu.pt]
2011/10/17 João Brandão jbrandao+/-ualg.pt
<owner-chemistry^-^ccl.net>:
> Sorry, but I disagree.
>
> "but if there are real concerns about the work, it is
necessary that
> the scientific community can look seriously at the code to see
exactly
> what the program
is
> doing."
>
> In my opinion:
> If anyone has real concerns about any work, the best way for science
> development is to write (or use) a different code and compare the
results.
>
The problem is: if the results do not agree with each other, how can
you adjudicate between the competing claims without access to the
code?>