On Thursday, February 12, I visited the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD on February 12 to present a seminar titled Restoring reproducibility: Making scientist software discoverable to the research reproducibility users’ group there. Hosted by Chandler Becker and Robert Hanisch, I also had the opportunity to talk with Jim Warren before the presentation; he asked excellent questions during the Q&A, too. Bob and I have often discussed (even argued!) about the amount of metadata the ASCL should maintain, and Jim’s questions were on this point.
After the presentation, I talked with Dan Wheeler, Kimberly Tryka, Andrea Medina-Smith, and Jonathan Guyer. Dan had excellent ideas for the ASCL; as we were standing by the conference room door, I didn’t have the opportunity to write these down but I hope to continue the discussion via email. Kimberly, Andrea, and I talked about metadata, indexing software, and how the ASCL maintains its links to software download sites. We would like to create a way to exchange and share discussion with a larger community and have already started chatting about how to do this in email. Jonathan and I talked generally about the ASCL and how change can occur in a community. After that, Chandler took me to the NIST museum (so cool!) and Bob showed me around a bit before my departure. I had a very interesting and thoroughly enjoyable afternoon!
The abstract and PowerPoint file for my presentation are below; the notes in the slides provide most of the text of my talk, though sometimes simply as bullet points.
Abstract: Source codes are increasingly important for the advancement of science in general and astrophysics in particular. Journal articles meant to detail the general logic behind new results and ideas often do not make the source codes that generated these results available, decreasing the transparency and integrity of the research. The Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL) is a registry of scientist-written software used in astronomy research. The challenges of creating and growing the resource will be covered by its current editor, who will also discuss specific steps the ASCL has taken to improve code discovery in astronomy and the effect this work is having within astronomy and more broadly in other research areas.