Karthik Ram will speak at the 14th annual Electronic Resources & Libraries conference.
Building Towards a Future Where Reproducible and Open Data Science is the Norm
The Open Science movement promotes the sharing of all artifacts of scientific research, including data, code, and methods. This movement has become popular among researchers worldwide, as evidenced by the thriving ecosystem of tools and the numerous training initiatives that have sprung up at various institutions.
An important component of the Open Science movement is open source software, which is essential to progress not only in science but also in engineering, the humanities, and many other fields. Open source software has already enabled several Nobel Prizes, such as for the discovery of gravitational waves by LIGO, and it will likely lead to more prizes in the future. Although researcher-developed software has become widespread, much of this software has not been developed in an efficient or sustainable way. Researcher-developers, while well versed in their given disciplines, generally do not have sufficient training and understanding of software best practices to ease development and maintainability and encourage sustainability and reproducibility.
Over the past decade, I have participated in various efforts to create the technical and social infrastructure and the sustainable software needed to enable reproducible research. These efforts include cofounding the grassroots rOpenSci project, which promotes open and reproducible research by enabling the discovery of data, code, and software, Data Carpentry, as well as a new NSF funded initiative called the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI).
In this talk, I will reflect on lessons learned from these different efforts and explore how libraries can play a fundamental role in enabling reproducible research and promote sustainable software practices.
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