(the struggle) Towards an open source policy

TL;DR

This paper introduces the ASTRON Open Source Policy for research software, emphasizing licensing, DOI assignment, and repository management to promote open, citable research code within the scientific community.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive open source policy for research software, including licensing guidelines, DOI assignment procedures, and repository management, tailored for the ADASS community.

Findings

Policy has been made publicly available with a DOI.

The policy aims to stimulate community discussion on open software.

Implementation of the policy promotes accessible and citable research code.

Abstract

Public availability and tracability of results from publically-funded work is a topic that gets more and more attention from funding agencies and scientific policy makers. However, most policies focus on data as the output of research. In this contribution, we focus on research software and we introduce the ASTRON Open Source Policy. Apart from the license used (Apache 2.0), the policy is written as a manual that explains how to license software, when to assign a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), and defines that all code should be put in an ASTRON managed repository. The policy has been made publically available, a DOI has been assigned to it and it has been put in a repository to stimulate the ADASS community to start a conversation on how to make our code publically accessible and citable.