Of note, this discussion was recently in the pages of Nature: http://www.nature.com/news/rule-rewrite-aims-to-clean-up-scientific-software-1.17323
Shane Caldwell McGill University On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 12:48 PM, James Stroud <[email protected]> wrote: > I hereby call on the broadest community of academics and researchers, > including scientists, historians, economists, sociologists, psychologists, > and whoever else has ever published a paper or read from the literature > thereof, to reject any and all papers that describe new software that > itself is not released under an open source model. > > I further declare that this post is designed to ruffle feathers and incite > incendiary conversation, to provoke all-caps and evoke multiple exclamation > marks with interposed “1”s where anger prevents one from properly holding > the shift key. > > My rationale for this post: I have just spent a week installing software > for structural biology (not crystallography) only to find that some of the > key utilities needed were described in a recent publication but were not > OSS. The authors have decided to stop supporting the software but have not > retracted their paper, which is completely irrelevant without the > availability of the software package they describe. > > Let’s hammer this one out and come to the rational conclusion that non-OSS > software should not be awarded publications. > > James >
