My criticism was only of the justification given. And honestly, the attitude in scientific publishing has never been "science should be written so that people in industry can reproduce the results at minimal effort/expense and without acquiring scientists who know the area and techniques well."

(Also, your post would have worked just as well without the first sentence.)

yeah, sorry about that. but biological systems are very complex so it's more important to know whether the claimed argument is verified. Finding a negative result under a different protocol would be very hard to analyze and pinpoint the source of the discrepancy.

Also, empirical science is very much the art of precise things. That's the difference between 20th century physics and ancient philosophy.

Agreed. I think results should be reproducible. I guess my point is that the amount of time spent writing up and communicating protocol should be governed by an analysis of the scientific benefits of doing so, rather than commercial benefits.

I'm not saying that protocols can't be improved at appropriate cost. Rather, I'm saying that the cost of creating protocols that random person at pharma company can use correctly the first time without asking for help is a going to result in an enormous amount of wasted time getting to a level of reproducibility that isn't necessary for doing good science (where good != profitable).

And at the frontiers of science where we're using a novel protocol for the first time, I think it's OK to publish without extensive documentation. If the protocol ends up being useful and important enough that other people want to use it, then that's the time to start investing time in high-quality documentation. Which is one of the scientific benefits of collaborative reproduction.

(FWIW I think michaelhoffman did a better job of capturing the essence of my complaint in a few sentences than I've done over multiple posts.)

> The specifics of the animals used for example may be the cause of severe errors and cause wildly different results.

That only underscores nmrm's point!

If the experiment is sensitive to the specifics of some animals, it might perhaps be wrong because of that. If the reproducers use animals with the same specifics, the could be led down the same wrong path.

But the only way to find out that the experiment is sensitive to specifics of some animals is to run it with different animals in the same laboratory.

If the original paper finds a result and I fail to find the same result with different animals, I have no way of knowing if the difference is because of my animals or some other small difference in experimental setup -- unless the experimental setup is explained in enough detail in the original paper.