[BruceIV]

Even if there's no publicly published code, any credible CS researcher will give you access to their code and tests for research purposes if you ask (excepting the rare case where they include someone else's IP), for exactly this reason of reproducibility.

Secondly, testing in a number of different environments is part of the nature of scientific reproducibility, to check if the claimed result is robust or simply an artifact of the experimental setup, so releasing more detailed specs of the hardware used is not so essential.

[nkurz]

Given that reproducibility is the standard by which scientific publications are usually judged, what would be the reason for only making the code available upon special request rather than simply making it available as part of the publication? This feels like publishing a paper about an experiment and saying "methodology available by special request".