What would you do if the author of a published CS article does not respond to code requests? Since reproducibility is a major principle or basic norm of scientific experiments, simulations, and computations, what would you do or what to do if the author of a published CS article does not respond to code requests?
Simply nothing, but trying to implement it yourself!
According to my experience, there would be four potential reasons because of which authors may refuse to share their code:
1- Their code needs to process some particular data that they are not allowed to share. Thus, the code by itself, without that specific data, does not reproduce the results of the paper. So, sharing the code does not fulfil any reproducibility purpose.
2- They feel that they may still release more &quot;major&quot; contributions of that code. Then, they would postpone the public release of the code until they feel that the code is milked enough, and they have run out of further remarkable ideas.
3- They may believe that if one is really interested in their work and the cultivation of ideas to expand its results, she herself codifies the paper since personal codification often leads to way deeper levels of understanding of what's behind a piece of code, rather than just running some already-cooked snippets.
4- They don't have further access to the code. Not everyone may keep a clone of her contributions on her personal hard drive depending on the policies of the academic or industrial body under which that code was written.