Good point. I don’t know. The situation might have improved already, in terms of people releasing their code (though probably not in terms of the code being of great quality). At least, from what I’ve seen, releasing data and code is now somewhat more common. For instance, when critiquing a recent paper by Mann, Steve McIntyre wrote:
Michael Mann has had a paper on the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) accepted by Geophysical Research Letters: “On forced temperature changes, internal variability, and the AMO”. The abstract and access to Supplementary Information is here . Mann has made a preprint of the paper available, here . More importantly, and very commendably, he has made full data and Matlab code available.
I don’t know if code quality has improved since the rather embarrassing 2009 leak.
The code for the Mann 1998 paper mentioned in the post was written in Fortran, and McIntyre found it on an old FTP server of Mann’s. He rewrote the code in R. At least people are writing code in languages like R and Matlab and maybe Python now.
Some researchers still use unconventional languages for their mathematical programming, making their results more difficult for colleagues to check even if they do release their code. See for instance:
Good point. I don’t know. The situation might have improved already, in terms of people releasing their code (though probably not in terms of the code being of great quality). At least, from what I’ve seen, releasing data and code is now somewhat more common. For instance, when critiquing a recent paper by Mann, Steve McIntyre wrote:
http://climateaudit.org/2014/05/19/manns-new-paper-recharacterizing-the-atlantic-multidecadal-oscillation/
I don’t know if code quality has improved since the rather embarrassing 2009 leak.
The code for the Mann 1998 paper mentioned in the post was written in Fortran, and McIntyre found it on an old FTP server of Mann’s. He rewrote the code in R. At least people are writing code in languages like R and Matlab and maybe Python now.
Some researchers still use unconventional languages for their mathematical programming, making their results more difficult for colleagues to check even if they do release their code. See for instance:
http://climateaudit.org/2013/04/22/non-centring-in-the-forest-2006-study/