Confessions of a researchaholic

January 7, 2013

Sharing code and data

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 1:08 am
Tags: ,

It is usually a very good idea to share the code and data along with our published papers. This will make it easier for others to test, understand, reproduce, and compare against our methods, which in turn can make us more popular, our papers more widely cited, and our technology more likely to be adopted by the industry and turned into real products.
Code and data repositories are also an important part of evaluating job applications.

(I have open sourced most of my first/single-authored projects, except my first 2 SIGGRAPH papers for which I could no longer find the code in the school server, which I greatly regret.)

Ideally the code should be in high quality, but even if not, sharing it can let others have a chance to improve the code (and motivate us to write good code).
It is fair to say that the code and data are no less important than the paper.

Some things to watch out for include institutional and legal constraints, such as trade secrets, copyrights, and patents, and not yet published future ideas.
These can be planned and managed via different git branches (e.g., a public branch that is gradually merged from a private branch).

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