Category Archives: oa.software

Helmholtz Open Science Briefing. Helmholtz Forum Research Software. Report

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The Helmholtz Forum Research Software, which is jointly supported by the Task Group Research Software of the WG Open Science and the HIFIS Software Cluster, hosted a Helmholtz Open Science Forum on the topic of research software on April 7, 2022. The event was organized by the Helmholtz Open Science Office. The virtual forum was dedicated to three aspects in the open and sustainable use of research software in the Helmholtz Association: policy, practice, and infrastructures and tools. The event was the second in a series of Helmholtz Open Science Forums on the topic. The first event took place in May 2021 under the title “Policies for Research Software”. This report (in German) documents the event.

FAIRware: towards FAIR community metadata practices | by Raphael Sonabend | Wellcome Data | Apr, 2022 | Medium

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“FAIRware aims to enable researchers to make their research practices more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR). It is a project that is being carried out by the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, as one of the five flagship projects of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI)*.

The FAIRware project is developing the FAIR Workbench, an open-source software that researchers can use to assess their own metadata. This will be made publicly available later this year — and in the meantime, the team are eagerly seeking collaborators who want to test the prototype….”

FFII | Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure information on software patents, enforcement of IP, trade agreements

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“The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) is a European alliance defending your right to free and competitive software creation since 1999. We are working towards the mitigation of legal risks in software development. We do so by keeping software free from patents and promoting a digital infrastructure based on genuine open standards and free and open hardware and software.

The FFII famously made a difference to prevent a EU software patent directive and continues to shed light on the schemes of the patent system to enter the software sphere and detach itself from democratic and fiscal oversight. One recent example is the Unified Patent Court (UPC). A specialised court which fences patent reforms off. We rely on networking with the European Parliament members and partners from industry and civil society. Its work won the FFII the Outstanding contribution to software development prize by CNET….”

Data and Software for Authors | AGU

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“AGU requires that the underlying data needed to understand, evaluate, and build upon the reported research be available at the time of peer review and publication. Additionally, authors should make available software that has a significant impact on the research. This entails:

Depositing the data and software in a community accepted, trusted repository, as appropriate, and preferably with a DOI
Including an Availability Statement as a separate paragraph in the Open Research section explaining to the reader where and how to access the data and software
And including citation(s) to the deposited data and software, in the Reference Section….”

Asclepias: Citing Software, Making Science

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“The Asclepias Project builds networks of citations between the astronomical academic literature and software, helping you find the tools to push your research forward….

The Asclepias Project is a joint effort of the American Astronomical Society, the NASA Astrophysics Data System, Zenodo, and Sidrat Research, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.”

Mozilla and Open Web Docs working together on MDN – Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

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“For both MDN and Open Web Docs (OWD), transparency is paramount to our missions. With the upcoming launch of MDN Plus, we believe it’s a good time to talk about how our two organizations work together and if there is a financial relationship between us. Here is an overview of how our missions overlap, how they differ, and how a premium subscription service fits all this….

MDN and Open Web Docs are different organizations; while our missions and goals frequently overlap, our work is not identical. Open Web Docs is an open collective, with a mission to contribute content to open source projects that are considered important for the future of the Web. MDN is currently the most significant project that Open Web Docs contributes to….

Mozilla and Open Web Docs collaborate closely on sustaining the Web Docs part of MDN. The Web Docs part is and will remain free and accessible to all. Each organization shoulders part of the costs of this labor, from our distinct budgets and revenue sources….”

Helmholtz Open Science: Policy documents on Open Research Data and Open Research Software now available in English

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Policy documents on Open Research Data and Open Research Software now available in English

February 22, 2022

Central policy documents on Open Research Data and Open Research Software of the Helmholtz Association are now available in English. These are: 

Open Research Data 

Recommendations for Policies of the Helmholtz Centers on Research Data Management

Open Research Software

Access to and Reuse of Research Software

Recommendations for the Implementation of Guidelines and Policies on Research Software Management at the Helmholtz Centers

Model Policy on Sustainable Software at the Helmholtz Centers

Checklist to Support the Helmholtz Centers in Implementing Policies on Sustainable Research Software

The Open Library Foundation Names First Open Source Project to its Project Incubation Program | Open Library Foundation

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“The Open Library Foundation has invited the Library Data Platform (LDP) to be the first open source project to participate in its Project Incubation Program. The program is designed to support early-stage open source projects and communities that are developing the balanced and robust mix of technology, governance, resourcing and community engagement required to be self-sustaining.

Library Data Platform began in 2018 as an effort to provide a reporting platform for FOLIO, an open source library services platform, and also to promote open source analytics and data integration capabilities in libraries. The LDP project community currently supports both FOLIO and Project ReShare and offers software that can serve as an open analytics infrastructure for diverse applications….”

Germany and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) for researchers | EOSC-Pillar

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In this webinar you will hear about EOSC, what EOSC can mean for you and what you can do to support EOSC, with a focus on the case of Germany. The webinar is organised by the EOSC-Pillar project, one of four regional projects that were launched specifically to bring EOSC closer to national research organisations and national data infrastructures.

Former Google CEO invests in computing help for university scientists | Science | AAAS

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“Scientists at universities perform much of the world’s cutting-edge scientific research—often while relying on shaky, homemade computer software written by students and postdocs. Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Wendy Schmidt, his spouse, hopes to remedy that situation by investing $40 million over the next 5 years to establish a Virtual Institute for Scientific Software, the organization announced today. The institute will help scientists obtain more robust, flexible, and scalable “open-source” software that can be easily shared.

The institute will include centers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), Johns Hopkins University, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Washington (UW). Each university will hire software engineers who will help meet the needs of scientists, explains Eric Braverman, CEO of Schmidt Futures. “We believe that a network of people developing software will be essential to the onward development of so many areas in the scientific enterprise,” he says.”

Astronomy community shapes their own destiny with Astropy · GitHub

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“Open source software provides the backbone for astronomical science. The Python ecosystem is particularly important to astronomers, who rely heavily on mathematical packages like NumPy and matplotlib for their work. Perhaps the most central tool in the modern astronomer’s workflow is Astropy, a collection of specialized Python tools built and maintained by and for the astronomical community. More than 400 people have contributed to Astropy, including astronomers and other scientists, software engineers, and infrastructure specialists….”

G6 statement on Open Science

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“The growing momentum for Open Science is in line with our mission to foster research excellence and to accelerate the advancement of science. Open Science principles and approaches were developed from within the scientific community itself, out of genuine self-interest and to further develop key scientific principles – the transparency of research practises, reproducibility of results, and the sharing of knowledge. By opening up publications, data, processes, codes, methods and protocols, it also offers new ways for scientific practices. G6, as Research Performing Organizations (RPO), are committed to excellence in research and Open Science is definitely a good approach to foster excellent research. G6 institutions actively support the transition to Open Science. This transition requires a concerted effort to reform cultural and technological practices. G6 institutions intend to contribute to this transition by jointly addressing the following priorities: …”

G6 statement on open science | CNRS

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The statement emphasises six priorities to support the transition to Open Science and foster excellence in research: accelerating Open Access as the default mode of academic publishing; making research data “as open as possible and as closed as necessary” in line with the FAIR principles; extending the principles of Open Science to research software; developing new procedures and criteria to assess research aligned with and supporting the development of Open Science; facilitating the necessary skill building process; lastly, maintaining appropriate infrastructures and services, across Europe if not globally, to keep up with current and future requirements resulting from the transition to Open Science. By jointly addressing these priorities, G6 institutions intend to actively contribute to this transition and to the concerted effort it requires to transform the practices of sharing knowledge between scientific communities.