How to answer a reviewer asking for the methodology code of the paper? Recently I have submitted my paper to IEEE Access Journal which has a binary peer review process, and I got rejected. Still, they allow me to answer the reviewers' concerns and resubmit again.
One of the reviewers asked: &quot;For the consideration of reproducibility, the code of the proposed method is suggested to be provided.
I want to know how I should respond to that concern politely as the author? I plan to provide all datasets and some part of the program, which is related to an example that I described in my paper. This simple example shows how my algorithm works and will help reproducibility (It shows the final result of applying the proposed method by considering one of the algorithms that I have used in my paper on a smaller dataset).
I want to know how to answer the reviewer politely and convincingly while explaining that I am providing some part of my programs, not all of it.
Thanks.
You cannot answer “convincingly”, because your assumption that it is okay not to provide the code is incorrect, and the reviewer is correct to ask for it. And the fact that it’s time-consuming to prepare the code for release is neither here nor there: it’s also time-consuming to write a good paper and polish it over and over to make it into something people can read and understand; but that’s what good researchers do, because they understand it’s important and that this is the way to do good science.
For a related discussion, see here.