Bring out your codes! Bring out your codes! (Increasing Software Visibility and Re-use)

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of increasing software visibility and reuse in astrophysics through community efforts, indexing, new journals, and discovery tools, aiming to improve scientific transparency and reproducibility.

Contribution

It highlights community initiatives and infrastructure developments that promote open code sharing and discoverability in astrophysics research.

Findings

Growing support for open code release in the community

Increased indexing and discovery tools for astrophysics software

Positive outlook for future progress in software visibility

Abstract

Progress is being made in code discoverability and preservation, but as discussed at ADASS XXI, many codes still remain hidden from public view. With the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL) now indexed by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), the introduction of a new journal, Astronomy & Computing, focused on astrophysics software, and the increasing success of education efforts such as Software Carpentry and SciCoder, the community has the opportunity to set a higher standard for its science by encouraging the release of software for examination and possible reuse. We assembled representatives of the community to present issues inhibiting code release and sought suggestions for tackling these factors. The session began with brief statements by panelists; the floor was then opened for discussion and ideas. Comments covered a diverse range of related topics and points of view, with apparent support for the propositions that algorithms should be readily available, code used to produce published scientific results should be made available, and there should be discovery mechanisms to allow these to be found easily. With increased use of resources such as GitHub (for code availability), ASCL (for code discovery), and a stated strong preference from the new journal Astronomy & Computing for code release, we expect to see additional progress over the next few years.