Science Is Open Software (jepedersen.dk)

This has all been profoundly obvious for at least well over a decade or even two now. A consequence has been that too many serious people are driven away from academia and research, to the detriment of science generally.

I've no idea what to do about all this, because people have voiced obvious and easy solutions for decades, but they are all routinely ignored.

I am also in academia and don't think this is true at all for data, not even remotely, unless by "publicly available" you mean "available to most academics or academic labs after an often tedious and slow approval process requiring an academic email and various signed agreements". Maybe what you are saying is true in some very specific domains (e.g. machine learning research), but in general what you are saying here is IMO wildly out of touch with present realities in the vast majority of fields, but especially those involving human subjects.

> While I have some sympathy with a lot of your bitterness, this statement is insulting silliness that a quick look at the list of Nobel Prizes in physiology and medicine would prove wrong. Almost all major breakthroughs in the applied sphere stem from decades of basic research that happened just because it interested someone.

Nobel Prizes are so rare they don't speak at all to the generalizations I am making here. Also, much medical academic research is successful because it is in fact ultimately industry-funded. It is of course though highly dependent on the academic subfield, for sure, and I was painting with a broad brush.

If I had to narrow things, STEM academic research isn't so bad, so long as we exclude social science from STEM. Much social science research needs to be defunded ASAP. And I'm not claiming industry research doesn't also have warped incentives. But, on balance, I'd wager outside of pure math/physics and certain more algorithmic/pure domains in comp sci, the smartest people today are going to choose (and be found in) industry, not academia.

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

> TL;DR I claim that modern science is synonymous with open source software

That's a strong statement that's not supported by the arguments and IMO misguided.

I don't have a problem with "open", but rather with "software".

Both science and software deal with models, however the focus is quite different. I suspect you conflate theory with models.

The goal of science is to produce and test theories — that's an inductive/abductive process. A model, regardless of whether it's reified into mathematical formulas or software, is a means of making a theory operational enough that its consequences can be derived and confronted with observations.

Software often starts downstream of this: it's a reification of theories, models, algorithms, or findings that are the result of research. Of course software can also be used as part of the research process itself. The distinction is roughly the familiar one between research and development.

Or like a machine learning lab claiming SOTA on a benchmark, beating a well-known method that they re-implemented, possibly with bugs, on their private dataset, for millions of compute. But you don't get the source to check, and they don't release any intermediate results or ablation experiments. Aka, from the outside you can't distinguish it from corporate marketing.