Getting credit for scientific software

While reading an NSF "Dear Colleague" letter on data citation in the geosciences, I came across this quote from the American Geophysical Union,

..the scientific community should recognize the professional value of data activities by endorsing the concept of publication of data, to be credited and cited like the products of any other scientific activity, and encouraging peer-review of such publications.

I agree completely!    Now what would it take for AGU, or any other physical science society, to say:

"the scientific community should recognize the professional value of scientific programming activities by endorsing the concept of publication of code, to be credited and cited like the products of any other scientific activity, and encouraging peer-review of such publications."

The data citation movement is really a great development for geoscience.   Like code, data products often have many hands involved in them, more then the number of authors on a typical climate paper.  They undergo revisions and can be used and reused for years.  If the community can figure out things like what a "first author" means for a data product, what the "impact factor" is for a data product and get citations of data accepted in tenure cases co-equal with other publications then its a short step to doing the same for code.

Peter Gleick is still a good scientist

(A raging climate-blogosphere story is a great excuse to start posting again!)

As I read many of the stories on Peter Gleick's pranking of the Heartland Institute (see this Guardian story for a pretty good summary), I find I mostly agree with Joe Romm who basically says that this is peanuts compared to what Heartland and their ilk are doing to our future planet with their obfuscation campaign.

Indeed I can't believe how many people are rushing to their fainting couch over this.

Peter Gleick is a trained scientist but amateur journalist.  His general-interest writing on water and climate issues is actually quite good.   Doing science and doing journalism are two different things.  If Dr. Gleick committed some kind of ethical lapse in his journalism exploits, that shouldn't have any impact on his standing as a scientist.

Scientists should not let themselves be boxed in as perfect beings who apply the ethical standards of science in every activity of their lives.  That's not a standard that human beings can meet and scientists are indeed human.