Bill Branan
Hodson Director, Open Source Programs Office and Digital Research & Curation Center
Johns Hopkins University
Amber Budden
Associate University Librarian, Digital Strategies
University of California, Santa Barbara
Vessela Ensberg
Associate Director of Product & Strategy
University of California, Davis
Todd Grappone
Associate University Librarian, Collections, Research Data Services & Scholarly Communication University of California, Los Angeles
David Lippert
Open Source Program Office Director
George Washington University
Open source software (OSS) is an increasingly important component of the research enterprise, as evidenced by the growing prevalence of funder policies that require source code created as part of research initiatives to be made publicly available alongside manuscripts and data. Some activities that support OSS projects benefit from an academic Open Source Program Office (OSPO) that is able to take campus-specific actions, while others can be achieved more effectively by leveraging a network. The panel will discuss three levels of OSPO collaboration initiatives: campus-, system-, and international-level, and the activities that arise from each approach. The campuses represented are still experimenting with different models, including position allocation, engagement, governance, and coordination. The panel will review their activities in the education, community, and sustainability areas, and they will highlight that developing an OSPO is not an all-or-none state. Finally, they will solicit community feedback on an academic OSPO definition developed by the Community for University and Research Institution OSPOs (CURIOSS). Presentation co-authored with contributions from Peter Brantley and Megan Forbes.
