This post is a reflection following up a recent article. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-023-02008-w

In my experience in Earth science, research software development is always under-appreciated. Software development has never received enough credits and needless to say publish in a high impact journal.

Looking back in 2015-2017 when I started to use Github, there were barriers that prevents me from practicing the open source better. I had several papers that I didn’t share all the code and data then.

But now I have contributed multiple open source projects. With platforms like Github, Zenoto, Overleaf, sharing resources are becoming easier and easier.

But at the same time, I can still see lots of papers are not making the data and code publicly available, especially when the conclusions drawn are also questionable.

My current practices to promote open science:

  1. Only read and recommend papers that share both data and code;
  2. Only cite papers that share both data and code;

Like the old saying, talk is cheap, show me the code, we cannot trust research that cannot be reproduced.

Personally, I think if you can’t even share your work with your family with excitements, how can you convince yourself the meaningness of research?