[skybrian]

I have no particular expertise here, but I wonder if you've learned to accept a mostly-broken process? We have the Internet, so why settle for slow diffusion over years instead of rapid communication?

Why should graduate students have to spend years trying to reproduce stuff that turns out to be no good? Nobody should have to put up with getting their time wasted like that.

[phreeza]

I think it is a social problem, not a technical one. A healthy research field should have some level of cooperation between participants. If you go ahead and publish a "this does not reproduce" paper, you can easily ruin someone's career, so in most cases you don't. I know this is not the platonic ideal of science, but it is the reality, especially of smaller research communities. I agree this is not ideal, but not sure if I would call the process broken though.

[skybrian]

This concern over ruining someone’s career itself seems like a symptom of a broken process? Making it safe to openly discuss failures is important.

In at least some big companies in the private sector we have “blameless postmortems” where we describe what went wrong in an operational failure without blaming the participating employees.

[phreeza]

Sure having blameless postmortems would be amazing, but I think the informal process I described is probably the closest you will get to it. The reason being that any given subfield can't make this decision in isolation, because the people to who it matters (funding agencies, faculty search committees, journal editors to a degree) are not part of the field, and when they see such a 'blameless postmortem' they will think 'whoa, this person really messed up, we'd better stay away'.

Maybe I am wrong though, and a better culture is possible, like the shift to preprints has happened in a lot of fields and was probably previously unthinkable. So good on you for taking an idealistic stance, I am probably just being grumpy. That being said, whatever culture changes may be beneficial, I stand by my original point that simply dumping code and model alongside the paper is not unambiguously good and may even obscure problems.