How to make models more useful

Computational modeling has become a valuable tool for science and policy, but community standards to share model details have not kept pace. For research to be replicated, evaluated, and improved, it’s important that model code—written in a way that is comprehensible, transparent, and, in an ideal world, easily executable—be preserved alongside the published articles that describe the results. This is not yet the case for most modeling science. To respond to this challenge, the scientific modeling community has come together to promote best-practice standards for publishing model code and support professional incentives to encourage their adoption. But we need to do more.