SIAM: Top Ten Reasons To Not Share Your Code (and why you should anyway)

Use the link to access the full text article published in SIAM News, a publication of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.  The article opens as follows: "I am an advocate of sharing the computer code used to produce tables or figures appearing in mathematical and scientific publications, particularly when the results produced by the code are an integral part of the research being presented. I'm not alone, and in fact the number of people thinking this way seems to be rapidly increasing; see, for example, [1–3, 6–8, 10]. But there is still much resistance to this idea, and in the past several years I have heard many of the same arguments repeated over and over. So I thought it might be useful to write down some of the arguments, along with counter-arguments that may be worth considering. In this article I am thinking mostly of relatively small-scale codes of the sort that might be developed to test a new algorithmic idea or verify that a new method performs as claimed, the sort of codes that might accompany papers in many SIAM journals. It can be at least as important to share and archive large-scale simulation codes that are used as tools to do science or make policy decisions, but the issues are somewhat different and not all the arguments that follow apply directly. However, as computational mathematics becomes increasingly important outside the ivory tower because of these large simulation codes, it is also worth remembering that the way we present our work can play a role in the ability of other scientists and engineers to do credible and reliable work that may have life-or-death consequences. Reproducibility is a cornerstone of the scientific method, and sharing the computer code used to reach the conclusions of a paper is often the easiest way to ensure that all the details needed to reproduce the results have been provided. This article grew out of a talk with the same title that I gave in a minisymposium, Verifiable, Reproducible Research and Computational Science, at the 2011 SIAM CSE meeting in Reno, organized by Jarrod Millman. (Slides from my talk and others are available at http://jarrodmillman.com/events/siam2011.html.)"