Should code be released?

On any given day, medical researchers at Carnegie Mellon University may be investigating new ways to thwart the development of epilepsy or designing an implantable biosensor to improve the early detection of diseases such as cancer and diabetes. As with any disciplined pursuit of science, such work...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inCommunications of the ACM Vol. 53; no. 10; pp. 16 - 17
Main Author McCafferty, Dennis
Format Magazine Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Association for Computing Machinery 01.10.2010
Subjects
Codes
Computer science
Disclosure
Open source software
R&D
Research & development
United Kingdom > UK
United States > US
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN0001-0782
1557-7317
DOI10.1145/1831407.1831415

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Summary:On any given day, medical researchers at Carnegie Mellon University may be investigating new ways to thwart the development of epilepsy or designing an implantable biosensor to improve the early detection of diseases such as cancer and diabetes. As with any disciplined pursuit of science, such work is subject to rigorous rounds of peer review, in which documents revealing methodology, results, and other key details are examined. But, assuming software was created for the research, the question is whether a complete disclosure of the computer code should be included in the review process. For the past seven years, researchers at Purdue University have attempted to resolve this issue, especially with the study of nanotechnology. Funded by the National Science Foundation, nanoHUB.org has been established as a site where scientists and educators share simulation and modeling tools and run their code on high-performance computer resources, says software architect Michael McLennan, senior research scientist, Purdue.
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ISSN:0001-0782
1557-7317
DOI:10.1145/1831407.1831415