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Who Pays the Costs of Free and Open-Source Scientific Software?

Wed, September 4, 9:45 to 11:15am, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Four, Oak Alley

Abstract

Much attention around open science has been on the products and processes of individual research: freely-accessible scientific publications, shared scientific data and analysis code, public peer reviewing processes, and preregistration of protocols and hypotheses. We discuss a different dimension: general purpose open-source software (OSS) for scientific research. Instead of commercial data analysis software like SPSS, MATLAB, SAS, or Mathematica, scientists are increasingly relying on OSS languages like python and R, which have been extended with many software libraries that support scientific data management, analysis, and visualization.

Contemporary scientific research increasingly relies on this ecosystem of freely accessible and modifiable infrastructure, but who is paying the costs of developing and maintaining such software? We share results from an interview and survey-based study with OSS developers and maintainers currently or formerly in academia. In some cases, scientific software developers have found stable institutional homes where their OSS work is a recognized and rewarded part of their roles and career paths. However, many more face challenges as they navigate through institutions with more traditional incentive and reward structures.

Research grants do increasingly fund graduate students and postdocs to work as software developers in support of a research project, and more funders are requiring such software be openly released. However, releasing software as an OSS project can take substantial additional effort, and when traditional first-author publications in one’s own field are the coin of the academic realm, even high-impact, high-visibility OSS work that benefits many fields can be relatively disadvantageous for early career researchers.

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