Open v. Closed Source-Climate Change Research

theidocles writes "The ongoing debate over the 'hockey stick' climate graph has an interesting side note. McKitrick & McIntyre (M&M), the critics, have published their complete source code and it's written using the well-known R statistics package (covered by the GPL). Mann, Bradley & Hughes, the defenders, described their algorithm but have only released part of their source code, and refuse to divulge the rest, which really makes it look like they have some errors/omissions to hide (they did publish the data they used). There's an issue of open source vs closed source as well as how much publicly-funded researchers should be required to disclose - should they be allowed to generate 'closed-source' solutions at the taxpayers' expense?"

Comments

Arguments for & against open-source

[G4from128k]

Arguments for open-source science:

1. Replication: Science thrives on replicable results. If researchers don't publish everything, others cannot replicate the results and the original findings become suspect.
2. Knowledge Sharing: If the point of publicly funded academic research is to advance human understand of the world, then open access to methods (code) is a key part of that.
3. Reduce/Eliminate Stealth Patents: Releasing knowledge into the public domain will help nip patents in the bud.
4. Preserve Fair Use: University's trends toward turning research into money is threatening the basis of fair use for researchers. How long will it take intellectual property owners to get regulations on "fair use" because academic research has turned into another big, for-profit, corporate enterprise.

Arguments against open-source science:

1. Replication: Science thrives on replicable results. But the key is independent verification. If one scientist simply reuses another scientist's code, there is a chance (high, some would argue) that faults in that original code would corrupt both scientists' results. Closed-source forces independent verification.
2. Commercialization: If the point of publicly funded academic research is to create widely-used products and services, then the system needs some scheme for protecting the value of intellectual assets. Where the cost of bringing the product to market is very high (e.g., pharma), the company/investors needs some assurance that another company can't just copy the results when the product comes out.

I'm sure there are arguments on both sides.