On Thursday, March 18, I am giving the physics colloquium at Michigan Technological University (MTU), which has hosted the Astrophysics Source Code Library since the ASCL’s inception in 1999. Despite having worked on the ASCL for nearly eleven years, I’ve never been to MTU; though I wish the visit could be in person, the talk will be presented virtually over Zoom. The presentation abstract is below, as is a link to the slides and links for all of the citations and resources mentioned in the talk.

Abstract: Though computational methods are widely used in many disciplines, many researchers do not share the source code they develop, making it difficult to replicate and reuse the work. This presentation will cover the changing landscape that includes funders’ requirements, policy changes for existing journals, community resources, and more, that make it easy to release and archive codes to ensure they are available to support the research they enabled, improve the reproducibility of science, increase confidence in research, and meet new requirements made by funders and journals in many disciplines. It will also cover how the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL), which has been working since 1999 to improve the transparency of research by registering open codes used in research, has made it possible for software to be cited as a first-order research object, and how researchers can garner credit for their codes by having them cited correctly and improve papers by including citations for the computational methods that enabled the research.

Slides (PDF)

Journals

Astronomy and Computing (A&C)
Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology (ComAC)
Computing and Software for Big Science
Computer Physics Communications (CPC)
Journal of Open Research Software (JORS)
SoftwareX
Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS)

Change leaders and guidelines

CITATION file format (CFF)
CodeMeta
FAIR principles
FORCE11/FORCE11 Software Citation Principles
Software Sustainability Institute
Working toward Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE)

Social coding sites and archival services

Bitbucket
DOE CODE; more information
Figshare
GitHub
Software Heritage
Zenodo

Other resources

Asclepias
arXiv/arXiv Next Generation
CiteAs
DataCite
Software licensing resources | Licensing Astrophysics Codes special session at AAS 225
Papers with Code

Cited sources (in order of appearance)

Goble (2014)
Ince, Hatton, & Graham-Cumming (2012)
Allen, Teuben, & Ryan (2018)
Ryan, Allen, & Teuben (2019); Data and code
Collberg, Proebsting, & Warren (2014), PDF
Howison & Bullard (2016)
Mangul et al (2018)
Zorotovic, Schreiber, & Parsons (2014)
Smart (2018)
Neupane et al (2019); Vice article
Barba (2019)
DOE policy
DOE policy FAQ
NASA ROSES policy
NSF policy
Nature Portfolio policy
Science policy
AAS Journals policy