[viewfromafar]

Also CS, my interpretation of "what makes science work" is a little different and I would argue that - despite a lot of foundations and techniques being shared in research papers - this field more than any other is constraining the free circulation and application of knowledge.

The equivalent to those biomedical industry players are the big tech who develop closed source and push the edge in some area. They will publish but that does not mean you can replicate any of it.

Software is also fragmented, crippled by IP lawsuits, patent trolls and so on. This does inhibit ability of society to benefit from software since it depends on the private sector to sort things out. The PhDs go and build businesses to "make the science work" in that sense.

The ideal of detached pursuit of knowledge is not a complete fiction (despite the hyperbole), but it does remain an ideal that can only be approximated.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

As an academic, all my papers from the last 5 or so years have associated github repos where all the code is accessible under free licenses. Most of my peers in academia do the same. Documentation quality is admittedly quite hit-and-miss, because we aren't paid for that and we need to jump to the next paper, but all the code is there and everything can be replicated even if it takes some effort due to rushed code or suboptimal documentation.

Industry is a different world, and indeed there are plenty of opaque industry papers that aren't replicable at all because much of the model is essentially a trade secret, and the paper is more an avenue for bragging than for developing new knowledge together with the rest of the community. To be honest, I would just outright disallow that kind of papers. But that's not a popular opinion, and taking into account that big tech companies sponsor our conferences and provide grants, I can't blame those who think otherwise.