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by qchris 2108 days ago
I don't think that's quite fair. Irreproducible papers have supposedly gone through a fairly rigorous review process by their peers, and are usually published by someone with a PhD (or who will soon have one) at an institution of higher learning. Many papers (which often end up being irreproducible) use language that says "This is the thing I found, and it is/is not true."

OSS is often someone learning, or who has an itch to scratch, and put some code out there that may or may not solve your problem or work right. The "lack of warranty" clause in most open-source licensing is really important here, because it's largely designed to say "hey, I did a thing but make no guarantees so use at your own risk", whereas a published paper says "hey, a number of experts and people who should know all agree that this is a thoroughly-researched and well-thought-out position, and you can probably consider it to be true (or nearly so) and base some of your decisions on it." I think that change in context is really important to consider when making the analogy here.
1 comments
srtjstjsj 2108 days ago
> Irreproducible papers have supposedly gone through a fairly rigorous review process by their peers

This is a myth. Modern "peer review" simply means checking to see if the claim is interesting and if the proper Word or LaTeX template was used. Peer review meant replication in the distant past before the modern Grants and Impact Factor system was built.

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qchris 2107 days ago
> This is a myth. Modern "peer review" simply means checking to see if the claim is interesting and if the proper Word or LaTeX template was used.

I got peer review from two reviewers on a paper submitted to Frontiers last week--it consisted of much more than that. Sure, the reviewers couldn't replicate our exact work themselves, but the paper's methodology was also heavily considered, and both reviewers asked for modifications to be made on different parts of the paper.

It's an imperfect system, but it's not as if there's a rubber stamp floating around. The goals of the the peer review system vs. open source are fundamentally different, and the way the products for both are treated should reflect that.

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