The Practice of Archiving Model Code of Agent-Based Models

To evaluate the concern over the reproducibility of computational science, we reviewed 2367 journal articles on agent-based models published between 1990 and 2014 and documented the public availability of source code. The percentage of publications that make the model code available is about 10%. The percentages are similar for publications that are reportedly dependent on public funding. There are big differences among journals in the public availability of model code and software used. This suggests that the varying social norms and practical convenience around sharing code may explain some of the differences among different sectors of the scientific community.