[tpoacher]

I get where you're coming from, but this is unnecessarily reductive.

By this logic all companies maliciously sell broken software in order to charge for updates.

But obviously not all companies do that, those that do get called out for it, those that produce good products get a good reputation for it, etc. Similar things apply to academia.

"It ran once" papers run the risk of not getting cited as much compared to good papers with robust implementations, so the maligned incentive you describe isn't as clear cut, even in the corner case where the novelty is considered to be in the algorithm rather than the particular implementation. Worse, if the algorithm fails to reproduce, a researcher runs the risk of being retracted or shamed in subsequent publications when their work fails to reproduce. And reproducibility is a key aspect of journal publications in reputable journals, meaning less reproducible work will end up in lower quality outlets which often hurt one's career more than they help.

[time_to_smile]

> By this logic all companies maliciously sell broken software in order to charge for updates.

Your analogy here is not great since the parent's claim is that academics have no incentive to produce good, reproducible research, not that they are maliciously creating bad research.

A more apt analogy would be:

"By this logic all companies would be driven by quarterly metrics and rush out broken software and then charge for updates/support"

... which is pretty much the exact state of the industry right now.