It is generally a good idea, but I am not sure how efficient it would be, because scientists generally suck at programming, and wandering through a lamer's messy code is not that better than wandering through a poorly formulated scientific paper, very often it is even worse. Such a code written by nonprofessional programmers usually has very bad API design, very bad naming, poor to unacceptably poor performance, is often written in a high-level non-efficient language like Python, so you cannot just insert it into your program on C++. The scientists should better develop a standard for scientific papers, because they do not even name them consistently. Damn, people, the most advanced human knowledge is a collection of PDFs that are not good for anything except printing and forgetting. There is a program 'Mendeley', and all it does is it finds PDFs where you point it at, and renames it depending on how relatively successful it has parsed the article's author and the title. And it does suck, because it cannot even parse the author and title in 100% of cases. Will there be anything better in the XXI century for knowledge sharing and scientific collaboration except as writing a bunch of disconnected PDFs? At leats hyperlinks, for god's sake! Semantic web? Also, the traditional mathematical notation where any entity is marked with a single letter from Latin, Greek or another alphabet is exactly as very poor programming style where all your identifiers are like a, b, c, a1, a2, i3. For me, this makes parsing the scientific papers much harder.
the most advanced human knowledge is a collection of PDFs that are not good for anything except printing and forgetting
Yep, and we have no backup of science. If science is so important, why is there no backup of all these files? How important it must be that nobody is bothering- despite the moral implications- to make a complete backup? And why can't scientists access papers?
