The context of this question is computational earth science specifically meteorology/climatology but I am sure it applies to all the scientific disciplines where numerical methods are used.
Recently I had asked the author of a peer reviewed paper for the software that was used in the publication of his paper. He not only immediately provided the software but also gave me test data to verify the results of his paper. The same was done by a climate change institute affiliated to NOAA. They gave me their software and asked me to download the relevant data from the NOAA site to validate their conclusions and perhaps reuse their software for solving my problems. In both these cases the only requirement was that the software had to be cited in any paper that I publish in the future.
These two instances are not the problem. In another couple of cases when I asked the authors of the peer reviewed paper for their software to validate their work they refused claiming that is "private". My questions are therefore:
- Which one of these two occurrences is more common in meteorology/climatology?
- As somebody who is originally from a CS background (where code reviews are extremely common) I'm curious what is the current standard of reproducibility in meteorology/climatology?