crux VS 3d-reorganization-prostate-canc

Been there, done that. I published my doctoral research code [1] so that others could inspect, verify, replicate, extend, etc. YMMV, but the feedback I received from other researchers ranged from neutral to surprisingly positive (e.g. people using it in ways that pleasantly surprised me). But let me expand on my own experiences while developing that software, trying to figure out how to replicate the then-current state of the art.

At the time there were two widely used software packages for phylogenetic inference, PAUP* [2] and MrBayes [3]. The source code for MrBayes was available, and although at the time I had some pretty strong criticisms of the code structure, it was immensely valuable to my research, and I remain very grateful to its author for sharing the code. In contrast the PAUP* source was not available, and I struggled immensely to replicate some of its algorithms. As a case in point, I needed to compute the natural log of the gamma function with similar precision, but there was no documentation for how PAUP* did this. I eventually discovered that the PAUP* author had shared some of the low-level code with another project. Based on comments in that code I pulled the original references from the 60s literature and solved these problems that had plagued me for months in a matter of days. Now, from what I could see in that shared PAUP* code, I suspect that the PAUP* code is of very high quality. But the author significantly reduced his scientific impact by keeping the source to himself.

[1]: https://github.com/canonware/crux

You're right, it is substantially more work to clean and organize the code for publishing. Being open about your work does make the attack surface much larger and more likely to be nitpicked, criticized, have an error found, etc.

But it is more honest. Whatever you think about the effort required to do this, there's value in honesty.

Here is an example of my own scientific work:

- paper [0]

- preprint [1]

- GitHub [2]

It certainly wasn't easy to get all of this done. But doing this can also be a guide for others. They get to see exactly what you've done so that they don't waste months on the exact implementation. They can see where maybe you've made some mistakes to avoid them. They can see so much of the implicit knowledge that is left out of your paper and learn from it. Your code isn't going to be perfect, but what paper is, either?

Everyone will be a critic, anyway, so make it easy to pick up criticism of the stuff you feel the least confident in and do better next time. You won't get better if no one sees your code.

[0]: https://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/81/23/5833

[1]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.05.425333v2

[2]: https://github.com/LupienLab/3d-reorganization-prostate-canc...