In The Technology Takers: Leading Change in the Digital Era, Jens P. Flanding, Genevieve M. Grabman and Sheila Q. Cox explore how organisations and managers can lead change and pursue strategic opportunities at a time when contemporary digital technolo…
Category: Software
To rediscover their public value universities can learn from the free culture movement
The culture of acceleration and quantification that arguably defines contemporary academic research is closely related to the information society in which we live and the technologies that support it. In this post Dafne Calvo, argues that the democratic decentralised principles of the free culture movement provide a blueprint for how academics and academic institutions might … Continued
DMPonline release notes: December 2019
It has been some time since our last release as we have been very busy with new DMPonline contracts and custom domain branding for enhanced subscribers. We have also been exploring different hosting options – considering moving to Amazon Web Services …
From Brain Blobs to Research Data Management
Why two neuroscientists turned librarians are investigating data management practices in fMRI research. … Continue reading →
Building a Community: Three months of Library Carpentry.
Back in May, almost 30 librarians, researchers, and faculty members got together in Portland Oregon to learn how to teach lessons from Software, Data, and Library Carpentry. After spending two days learning the ins and outs of Carpentry pedagogy and live coding, we all returned to our home institutions, as part of the burgeoning Library … … Continue reading →
Building a Community: Three months of Library Carpentry.
Back in May, almost 30 librarians, researchers, and faculty members got together in Portland Oregon to learn how to teach lessons from Software, Data, and Library Carpentry. After spending two days learning the ins and outs of Carpentry pedagogy and live coding, we all returned to our home institutions, as part of the burgeoning Library… Read more »
Understanding researcher needs and values related to software
Software is as important as data when it comes to building upon existing scholarship. However, while there has been a small amount of research into how researchers find, adopt, and credit it, there is a comparative lack of empirical data on how researchers use, share, and value their software. The UC Berkeley Library and the California […]
Why we need a hub for software in science: Research software developers deserve wider academic recognition.
Jure Triglav looks at how software recognition, credit and discovery is a massive problem facing the scientific community. Though instrumental to scientific innovation, software creation and maintenance is rarely recognised. By building a hub for research software, scientists could shine a spotlight on its developers and show the extent, importance and impact of their work. Enter Depsy – a new research hub made […]
Incentives for open science: New prizes to encourage research integrity and transparency in social science.
The high-profile political science study on same-sex marriage views, now determined to be fraudulent, is the latest case exposing the failure of incentive structures in the academy. The academic community must strengthen research evidence and do more to promote transparency. Temina Madon shares the launch of prizes run by the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) that look to provide recognition, visibility and […]
Software Management Plan Service prototype live
Guest blog post by Mike Jackson, Software Architect at the Software Sustainability Institute. Reposted from the SSI blog.
Software management plans set down goals and processes that ensure software is accessible and reusable throughout a project and beyond. To complement our guide on Writing and using a software management plan we have now developed a prototype software management plan service, powered by the Digital Curation Centre‘s data management plan service, DMPonline
It is easy to concentrate on the short-term issues when developing scientific software. Deadlines for publications, collaboration with others and the demands of a daily routine all conspire to prevent proper planning. A software management plan can help to formalise a set of structures and goals that ensure research software is accessible and reusable in the short, medium and long term. It also helps researchers to consider whether third-party software to be used within a research project will be available, and supported, for the lifetime of the project. They can also give funders confidence that software they have funded survives beyond the funding period, that there is something to show for their investment.
In 2012 we wrote a guide on Writing and using a software management plan to take researchers through the questions they should consider when developing a software management plan. This was influenced by work by the Digital Curation Centre on data management plans.
Both our advisory board, and participants at our Collaborations Workshop 2012, suggested that we complement our guide with an online service. An online service could help researchers understand issues around research software, appreciate why software management plans are important and assist in the preparation of them.
Rather than create yet another service from scratch, we decided to practice what we preach and see if we could reuse an existing research output, DMPonline. DMPonline is the Digital Curation Centre’s data management plan service which helps researchers write data management plans. DMPonline is a Ruby on Rails application and the source is hosted on GitHub licenced under GNU Affero GPL.
We took DMPonline, and updated its form and content into a prototype software management plan service, which is now live. The source is on GitHub.
We hope the service will prompt discussion on:
- What software management plans should contain.
- What features a service like this should support, what questions it should ask, and what advice it should give.
- Overlaps between software and data management plans.
If you have any suggestions then please get in touch. Likewise, we want to collect examples of software management plans that we can link to, so if you have one you are willing to share, please let us know.
We are working closely with the Digital Curation Centre, providing feedback on our experiences in customising DMPonline – DMPonline has been deployed at a number of institutions around the world and the Digital Curation Centre want to make this easier to do. We will also be discussing the overlaps between software and management plans, and whether these can be combined in some way, and, if so, how. And, we’ll be helping with the development of an API for DMPonline.
Both Marta Ribeiro of the Digital Curation Centre and myself will be at our Collaborations Workshop 2015 this week, giving lightning talks and a demo.