The ASCL was well-represented at the AAS 231 Hack Together Day on Friday, January 12, with Advisory Committee Chairman Peter Teuben working on two hacks, one of which hopes to provide better guidance regarding software to reviewers, dashboard developer PW Ryan also working on two hacks, both related to the ASCL and research we’re conducting, and yours truly; I mostly worked on ASCL tasks that have been backlogged, such as adding preferred citation information to ASCL entries. The ASCL currently has preferred citation information listed for 25% of our entries; we will be adding this information to more records in 2018 where we can find it, though I note that many code sites do not list a preferred citation on their download sites.

For one of his hacks, Ryan grabbed all the Github links in ASCL entries, and then using a Ruby Gem that looks for licenses in Github repos, reported on the licensing information available. These results are preliminary, so please don’t take them as gospel, but it appears that a whopping 34% of these codes do not have licensing information in the repo. The most popular license is MIT, which does not surprise me, as Daniel Foreman-Mackey reported in the Special Session we held at AAS 225 that MIT was the popular license across all Github repos that have licensing info.