&gt; The open question is whether Travis would consider whether open science is related to open source, hence whether it&#x27;s legitimate to use their free CPU muscles to do science.<p>The way Travis sets it up, it&#x27;s free to run tests on any public repo. So OP&#x27;s mechanism is a neat way to do repeatable (science) experiments, but I feel Travis would be in the right to say &quot;hmm, no, you can&#x27;t eat up tons of compute for free that isn&#x27;t in the service of building software&quot;.<p>That said, 45 minutes of compute on an n1-standard-1 is just 3.75 <i>cents</i>. So this only becomes a real pain if lots of people do it and start triggering say 100 builds a month ($5 is my mental threshold).