Full Disclosure in Science

The advancement of science and technology depends upon the publication and open exchange of knowledge and materials, a backbone that has always been obligatory with regards to publicly funded research. In recent years, however, the ever-increasing reliance on computing has created scientific "black boxes" in the form of computer source code that is critical to understanding and evaluating the research but is often withheld information. In a Public Forum essay , a distinguished group of scholars including Paul Adams of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has put forth recommendations for solving this growing problem. In their Public Forum essay, Adams and his co-authors argue that these source code black boxes are creating far-reaching problems for understanding and reproducing new scientific research findings. The withholding of source codes is also contributing to the perception of a "credibility crisis" for computation research. "Source code is the human readable form of a programming language and contains the complete set of instructions for how a computer processes input data. In the absence of source code, the inner workings of a program cannot be examined, adapted or modified," state the authors.