Sustainable Software Ecosystems for Open Science

TL;DR

Building sustainable software ecosystems in science requires community effort, norms, and collaboration, emphasizing open, reproducible research where software is a first-class scientific product.

Contribution

The paper discusses the importance of establishing collaborative communities and practices to develop sustainable, open, and reproducible scientific software ecosystems.

Findings

Community norms are crucial for sustainability.

Open-source collaboration enhances scientific reproducibility.

Kitware's model supports interdisciplinary research.

Abstract

Sustainable software ecosystems are difficult to build, and require concerted effort, community norms and collaborations. In science it is especially important to establish communities in which faculty, staff, students and open-source professionals work together and treat software as a first-class product of scientific investigation-just as mathematics is treated in the physical sciences. Kitware has a rich history of establishing collaborative projects in the science, engineering and medical research fields, and continues to work on improving that model as new technologies and approaches become available. This approach closely follows and is enhanced by the movement towards practicing open, reproducible research in the sciences where data, source code, methodology and approach are all available so that complex experiments can be independently reproduced and verified.