Why aren't academics just hosting in the cloud ?
Here's an initiative by Jimmy Lin to standardize implementations of IR used in Academia. Reproducibility of results is now made possible:
https://github.com/lintool/IR-Reproducibility
many different reasons:
- no time
- no incentives (publish and perish)
- no knowledge
- usage of very different programming languages
- no platform to do this
We have to understand that programming an algorithm actually is not always "easy". Imagine a new method presented in an academic paper that you would actually like to use. Re-Coding the whole thing that it works exactly the way presented sometimes is not possible (as not all implementation details are explained in the paper).
But imaging having a place (like Algorithmia) where researchers can upload there implementation (without giving access to their source code) and for others to access this algorithm with a very easy to use API would be a huge step forward in academics.