Fernando Rios
CLIR Research Data Management Fellow
Johns Hopkins University
Jeffrey Spies
Co-Founder, CTO
Center for Open Science
Rick Johnson
Co-Program Director, Digital Initiatives and Scholarship
University of Notre Dame/Association of Research Libraries
Micah Altman
Director of Research
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Software produced as part of the academic research process is an important part of the scholarly record since it is a manifestation of the creative process that enables discovery. Therefore, ensuring that its intrinsic scholarship value is not lost is of great importance. The last five years have seen a significant increase in activity by university libraries and community-driven organizations towards supporting the preservation of the scholarship value of research data. However, the same cannot be said for the software created or used to work with that data. From the lens of reproducible research and open science, this project briefing highlights challenges and current work at each speaker’s organization around providing services and tools to support the preservation and sharing of research software. The Center for Open Science (COS) is developing the free, open source Open Science Framework (OSF) that focuses on managing, curating, sharing, and preserving research workflow. The research lifecycle often includes software at various stages. By taking an approach centered on integration with other services, software preservation and sharing can be added to a researcher’s workflow rather than being appended to it thus increasing preservation efficacy.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries is investigating lifecycle models for software curation and is conducting an environmental scan of software repositories, and of journal and funder policies. The University of Notre Dame is investigating research software environment capture and reproducibility through the DASPOS (Data and Software Preservation for Open Science) project, and has partnered with the COS to better unify the research lifecycle through implementation of OSF for Institutions (OSFI) integrated with university resources such as high performance computing and repository services. Through OSFI, Notre Dame and Johns Hopkins University (JHU) have also partnered to develop research data archiving tools for the OSF and Fedora repository. Finally, the Data Management Services group at JHU is addressing an institutional gap in consulting and archiving service provision for supporting reproducible and reusable computational research as well as supporting current and future data/software sharing requirements from funders and publishers.
Presentation (Altman)
