[open-science] Software is fundamental to research - show your support!

Sun Oct 19 20:34:41 UTC 2014

Jenny Molloy Sat Oct 18 12:08:03 UTC 2014 [1]
>>> Software is fundamental to research - show your support! http://bit.ly/SoftwareIsFundamental

William Waites Sat Oct 18 12:12:39 UTC 2014 [2]
>> There is a field for comments or messages to go along with your signature. I put something to the effect of free software being essential for transparency and reproducibility of research.

Yes! I put

> Scientific software should be treated like other scientific artifacts: codes should be open (for maximum social benefit) and reproducible (for verification and extension). In pursuit of both objectives, use of open-source stacks must be preferred. Applications--code specifically written for a study--should be maintained in public repositories, and application dependencies (e.g., libraries, interpreters, compilers, operating systems) should similarly be non-proprietary and openly available. (Ultimately, society must "open hardware"--the base of the stack--as well, for the same reasons. Meanwhile, scientific applications should be written as portably as is feasible.) An scientific application written in a proprietary "computer language," or for a proprietary environment, should be as ridiculous as a paper written in a proprietary natural language.

I was gonna say something about the need to connect assimilation code[3] to data produced with it, but my explanation was clunky and overlong. Listizens are invited to do a better job of explaining (and to share for future reuse :-)

FWIW, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>

[1] https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-science/2014-October/003586.html . BTW, thanks to whoever set Mailman for this list to archive monthly: daily archiving made threads hard to follow.
[2] https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-science/2014-October/003587.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_assimilation