Conclusions

Although still in the minority, there is evidence that healthcare DES authors are increasingly sharing their model artifacts. This presents opportunities for others, including early career researchers, and health service practitioners to reuse, learn from and reproduce results from DES papers. The current trend of sharing DES models is far from perfect. There are many (simple) best practices the community can adopt, such as the use of trusted archives, and documentation, to improve its sharing. Reviewers, researchers and funders all have a role to incentivise and support authors to do so. A potential barrier to sharing remains time; if sharing of models is going to happen, then planning for this from the start of a project potentially spreads the effort across the study duration. It seems essential that new methods for preparing and sharing high quality simulations are developed. Finally, although commercial software dominates the DES literature, free and open source software plays a crucial role in sharing and could be considered by authors looking to share models.