I agree, the processes established in the Eclipse working groups to handle code and all other software related issues are handled already and additionally are handled highly professional.
You may compare these processes with those established by publishers for their journals to publish papers with quality and high impact. Even if these processes seem to be much more complex for software than for papers, in my humble opinion, the Eclipse Foundation has them in place.
The only thing that is missing is a 'badge' that is a 'currency' in science which allows measuring impact and thus is an incentive to 'publish' software. Namely this badge is a DOI. GitHub, Zenodo and Figshare made a first attempt last year. It's a first step but it's far from being what would be possible ( see also http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14978 ).
I think the Eclipse Foundation with its Science and Location Tech WGs is in a very good position to really consider the idea of minting DOIs to software releases.
Of course, it means to work out a concept, to implement it, and to live with all the implications that come with the minting of DOIs. However, it's worth to start discussions, to share ideas, to draft a concept, and finally to sit back and rest for a while letting it grow in our heads.
I would be happy to get in touch with you to drive things forward.
Yep, open source is a basic concept of this approach. Hence, I could
imagine that the Eclipse Foundation respectively the Science and
LocationTech WGs could become key players in the field as follows:
A) Reproducibility -> there are good techniques/practices at the
Foundation to build software continously (CBI, Hudson, ...)
B) Code review -> it's a common practice to use Gerrit to review
submitted code and having mentors to assist newbies
C) Legal issues -> the foundation has thorough knowledge to
balance industries, universities and developers needs
D) Release management -> there is extensive knowledge how to
orchestrate and release projects
E) Code management -> all projects use Git, hence it's easy to
create a tag for a certain DOIed release/package
A citation through DOIs could increase the visibility of both
working groups and thus would bring reward to its authors and gain
further interest by universities and industry.
Best,
Philip
Am 16.04.2015 um 19:59 schrieb Scott
Lewis:
On 4/16/2015 8:32 AM, Peter A wrote:
Hi,
I would be interested in joining that Hangout. The
situation is a little bit of a mess right now. Besides
authors not getting acknowledgement there is the
reproducibility issue. Different implementations of the
same algorithm can have very different results. When I
review a paper I try to remind people to cite the software
and the specific version. I know of at least a couple of
cases where performance claims were invalid because they
used software with a known "bug" in it.
I've been lazy and haven't bothered to publish papers for
most of my software. Used to get e-mails from people asking
how to cite it since there was no paper. I now think people
have learned how to cite webpages better.
For everyone's info: There is a 2014 book from CRC Press called
Implementing Reproducible Research [1]. There two chapters that
discuss the use of OS practices in the conduction of science
research, and they make points wrt reproducibility similar to
those Peter has made above. One of those chapters is by Millman
and Perez, and in keeping with many of their points they've made
the chapter available via github [2]. :)
My point with this reference is to support what Peter is saying
WRT reproducibility, but also to point out the other ways that
open source...both in the creation of scientific software and in
research practice/process...can/could/will/is benefiting the
conduction of scientific research.
My $0.03: I perceive that there is a great hunger in research
communities for the now clear benefits of using open source
practices: collaboration, transparency and the resulting
improvements in communication and education, technical innovation,
cross-org and cross-discipline information sharing, as well as the
rigor and scalability that comes from 'good practice/process'
(e.g. releng) and associated tooling...to mention but a few ;).
Philip, thanks for raising this issue and
thanks to all for sharing.
If you are interested we may arrange a
Hangout to share and discuss ideas. We may present
approaches and activities already implemented as well as
ideas and eventually next steps how to overcome related
issues.
If this would be fine with you we could
consider end of April or beginning of May for a Hangout.
I like the
blogpost about the reasons to be a research
software engineer :-).
Thanks also Jay for adding your comment. As far
as I understood Martin, the DOIed "software"
package could contain also a paper describing
it. The difference to a sole paper is, that the
reviewers and/or readers can have a better
understanding of it by using the software with
test or real world data.
Best,
Philip
Am 16.04.2015 um 14:46 schrieb Jay Jay
Billings:
I concur, although I will add
one point.
We recognize these problems at ORNL and
are working on it. However, one thing that
we have started doing to kind of have our
cake and eat it too is to publish papers
on the software itself from a software
engineering perspective and to work with
users to jointly author papers on the
science. Most of both papers can be
constructed from documentation in the
source.
Martin gave an excellent talk about
the publication of software at the
EGU meeting yesterday. Scientists
get reward for papers but not for
software. Papers are cited, software
not. That's a drawback for a
scientific career. As we know,
software has become crucial in
scientific research nowadays. Hence,
I'd like to share some of Martin's
ideas with you:
* Certain Science/LocationTech WG
releases/packages get a DOI
* The DOI points to a landing page
with appropriate metadata to cite
the release/package
* The release/package can be cited
and will be ranked on Google Scholar
and other systems
= This could be an incentive for
more scientists to publish their
software under the umbrella of the
Science and LocationTech WG.
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