Credit for open source software development in academia

[mpacer]

Discussion topic:
Credit for open source software development in academia

Brief description of issue/challenge:
Academia gives credit for citations easily. Traditionally, it is hard to get software to be cited even by the researchers who use the software. We have made some progress in providing ways for software to become citable (JOSS and the SciPy Proceedings are two example models). However, there remain problems. The practice of citing software still is not widespread. Perhaps more concerning is that the unit of work in academia is fairly different from that in open source software. It would not make sense to cite a Pull Request, or to publish a new citable object for each new version of a software package.

Lead/moderator:
M Pacer?

Links to resources:

• Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS)
• Scipy Proceedings
  • SciPy Proceedings software

[teuben]

ASCL (ascl.net) is a repository of astronomical software, that feeds directly into ADS (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/) which gives credit for software using their automated metrics. This is an example of how it works now, but we can think of better ways once the journals have a more formal connection of data and software, parallel to the paper. ApJ (AAS.org) now tried to do this.

[abbycabs]

Related to Mozilla's work on contributorship badges for science: https://science.mozilla.org/blog/contributorship-badges-for-science-view-them-now

[kyleniemeyer]

Group 1's discussion on Tuesday morning: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SYtRpcht7sdtgPak5OLQmpo5ml92EtMt2fzOmTg4jZI/edit

[kyleniemeyer]

Relevant article on assessing scientists for promotion and tenure (mentions software once or twice): https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2004089

[mpacer]

I created #48 to have a separate venue for discussing the non-(paper+citation) based metrics for research software since that wasn’t the focus of yesterday’s convo, but was agreed to be an important topic worth discussing (especially with @karthik’s suggestion for URSSI labs to research this).