Essential Open Source Software for Science: Supporting the Computational Foundations of Biology
Dario Taraborelli, Jeremy Freeman, Nicholas Sofroniew • July 8, 2019
(reposted from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Science Medium)
Open source software is a key ingredient of modern science. Hundreds of software packages, libraries, and applications have become essential tools. Whether it’s searching a genome sequence for a disease gene, counting cells in a microscope image, or tracking the evolution of an Ebola outbreak, software is critical to the work scientists do every day — and much of it is built by researchers who volunteer their time and effort to make their tools available and usable by others. Despite its importance, the majority of open source software is undervalued and lacks funding for maintenance, growth, development, and community engagement — especially after its initial phase.
URSSI Conceptualization Survey Results
Jeffrey Carver • May 20, 2019
To better understand research software user and developer communities, we conducted a survey of research software users and developers. The focus of the survey was to gather information to help identify how to increase the sustainability of research software. To gather a broad range of perspectives, we distributed the survey to 25,000 NSF and 25,000 NIH PIs whose projects involve research software, as well as mailing lists of interested people such as the WSSSPE email list. In addition, we used snowballing by asking people to forward the survey to others who might be interested. This effort is part of the URSSI conceptualization project, which seeks to understand the diverse challenges and barriers that the research software community faces.
Why Research Software Engineers?
Ian Cosden • April 16, 2019
At Princeton University, our Research Software Engineering group is nearing its third birthday but many people still ask basic questions about us: What is a Research Software Engineer? What do you do? How do you work with researchers?
In an attempt to answer some of these questions I like to begin with an analogy.
Most adults know how to cook something. Maybe it’s ramen, tacos, or lasagna. Some are pretty terrible (me) and some are actually quite good cooks. If you want to learn how to cook there are lots of resources available: cookbooks, YouTube videos, there are even multiple television channels devoted to cooking. This is great, but all the reading and watching will not make you a professional chef. Instead, through a combination of training and experience chefs have developed a skill set and repertoire that allow them to cook at a level far above that of even very good home cooks. Perhaps more importantly, chefs view cooking as their profession.
Sandra Gesing • April 4, 2019
One goal of the conceptualization phase of URSSI is to gather as much input from the community as possible about the different facets and pain points of sustainability of research software: from career paths of software developers in academia to citations of software to gaps in existing training and education programs for software engineering. The awareness of the importance of this topic is evident in diverse initiatives and projects around research software sustainability such as WSSSPE (Working towards Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences) and BSSw (Better Scientific Software), and funding programs like the past NSF SI2, which also funds the conceptualization of URSSI, and its successor, CSSI. Our first community-driven URSSI workshop in April 2018 was the model for our second community-driven URSSI workshop in Chicago on October 23-24, 2018. This report describes the discussions and outcomes of the Chicago workshop, which featured lightning talks and interactive sessions with topics suggested and selected at the workshop. The workshop attracted 52 participants from 47 diverse affiliations including universities, national laboratories, industry, and funding agencies.
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