suchsciencewow

Definitely "find -exec"

Having worked with a large open-source scientific project, this is extremely reminiscent of the type of talk we would give to every new student or post-doc joining the project. Unfortunately, the outcome is entirely binary - either they understand both what to do and why its important, and also happen to do it already, or they don't understand it and they don't already do it. I can't really think of a single person who jumped from one category to the other over the years.

The reason for that is there was rarely any visible benefit from putting in the work to follow good computing practices. It certainly created a lot of pain when jumbles of broken and unreadable code were passed on to new people, who basically ended up reimplementing everything from scratch (I was one such person), but there is exactly zero punishment for doing that, and very rarely any reward for cleaning up code and data. So why bother?

As with the open-source publishing debate, there has to be an incentive system in place, and then people will do it. There are standardized (and required!) practices for things like bio protocols or reporting PV-performance data - only if computing had something similar do I see anything improving.

How are you planning on addressing the fact that none of this matters in the slightest if academic career growth/incentives/reputation specifically revolves around publishing boring pdfs in established journals? What do I gain by sending my work to your platform where the first question anyone in my "target audience" will ask is "why didn't this get published in a real journal, whats wrong with it?", and I will get essentially zero resume kudos points for it? Keeping in mind that it took me at least many months to do the work, I don't exactly have an abundance of papers to throw around, and my officemate almost certainly will submit work of similar quality to a traditional journal and reap the benefits of that.

Just saying, my decision to publish in traditional journals isn't as much as a decision as it is a requirement of the very career I am attempting to pursue.