(a white paper for the 2019 Collegeville Workshop on Sustainable Scientific Software (CW3S19))

As some may know, the first image of a black hole was announced April 10. This quickly led to a lot of different institutions explaining how they were involved (e.g., my own University of Illinois), as well as a bunch of software projects explaining how their software was used (e.g., Matplotlib). Those of us concerned with open source research software and its sustainability are trying to raise the profile of such software in research.

By Daniel S. Katz, Daina Bouquin, Neil Chue Hong   Identification of software is essential to a number of important issues, such as citation, provenance, and reproducibility. Here, we are focusing on issues related to citation. Identification can be thought of as a subset of naming. Some important questions are therefore: How do we name things? How do we know how things are named? And who gets to name things?

I’ve previously written about the concept of workflows, sets of independent tasks connected by data dependencies, being expressed either as data, for example, a Pegasus DAG or CWL document, or as code, for example, a Python program written in Parsl.

While preparing for a workshop that the URSSI project is hosting on software credit today, I started thinking again about a recent blog by Titus Brown, “Revisiting authorship, and JOSS software publications.” Titus says, “fundamentally, in order to nurture a diverse array of valuable scientific contributions, we need new models of publication with new models of authorship,” a statement with which I strongly agree, and in fact, part of the

This blog post is intended as companion text for a talk I gave at the September 2018 NumFOCUS Project Forum in in New York, though I also hope it stands on its own. To address software sustainability, it is important first to understand how the term sustainability is used more generally.  It’s most often used in the context of ecology, often specifically in the relationship between humans and the planet.

Following Titus Brown’s blog post, A framework for thinking about Open Source Sustainability?, which follows Nadia Eghbal’s, An alternate ending to the tragedy of the commons, I’ve finally started reading Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons. I urge you to read Nadia’s and Titus’ blog posts.

Inspired by talks at the International Workshop on Science Gateways a few weeks ago, in particular keynotes by David De Roure on Social Machines and Michelle Barker on the evolution of Science Gateways, I started thinking about what would happen if we considered all computational and data software in the form of science gateways. The definition of a science gateway has shifted a bit over time.

This short blog post is really a pointer to another post that I co-wrote (with Sandra Gesing, Olivier Philippe, and Simon Hettrick), “Results from a US survey about Research Software Engineers,” as the initial post for the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) blog.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve been awarded an inaugural fellowship from the Better Scientific Software (BSSw) Project, along with my great colleagues, Jeff Carver, Ivo Jimenez, and Andrew Lumsdaine.

I would like to have a well-functioning, easy-to-use, software citation system in place. In brief, I believe that doing so would increase the recognition of the role of software and its developers and maintainer in research, and would provide them credit in a manner that would be useful in the academic and related settings in which many of them work.