Opani is actually a huge step in the right direction. I think Marcio's post is fantastic. I would in fact add an additional idea to it.
In addition to the open prestige inherent in GitHub, there is also the fact that one's work is vetted by a community. It becomes very difficult if not impossible to publish crap and claim that it is quality. In science this is not the case. The peer review system is supposed to protect us against that. However, my understanding is that a surprising percentage of research in top ten journals can't be reproduced either because key details about implementation are missing or because it is actually not reproducible.
A GitHub for science could also meaningfully move the ball forward in making science reproducible as it should be easy to wrap ones scripts in a specification of an "environment" that can be readily setup, deployed, and run. A lot of work would be required to develop corollaries for non-computational scientific domains, but it would be a hugely valuable effort as discussed in the general reproducible research community (http://reproducibleresearch.net/).
In addition to the open prestige inherent in GitHub, there is also the fact that one's work is vetted by a community. It becomes very difficult if not impossible to publish crap and claim that it is quality. In science this is not the case. The peer review system is supposed to protect us against that. However, my understanding is that a surprising percentage of research in top ten journals can't be reproduced either because key details about implementation are missing or because it is actually not reproducible.
A GitHub for science could also meaningfully move the ball forward in making science reproducible as it should be easy to wrap ones scripts in a specification of an "environment" that can be readily setup, deployed, and run. A lot of work would be required to develop corollaries for non-computational scientific domains, but it would be a hugely valuable effort as discussed in the general reproducible research community (http://reproducibleresearch.net/).