Category Archives: conferences

The ASCL at AAS 243: A Special Session and posters!

The ASCL is at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), which is taking place in the major food destination New Orleans. In addition to tracking down beignets and bread pudding, ASCL team members have shared the stage with others in a Special Session and have presented iPosters. The Special Session was held on Monday afternoon; iPosters were presented on Monday and Tuesday evenings.

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Special Session: Into the Future: Building on 25 Years of Community Organization in Astro Software Development

Abstract: Over the past 25 years, astronomy has seen many changes involving research software development. These include improved transparency, improved software availability, and changes in journal policies. Formal recognition of community-based software development has increased through targeted funding, the establishment of new journals specifically focused on software, and code citation.

Changes in astro software development include the rise of open social coding sites such as GitHub and GitLab, the establishment and growth of conferences devoted to or including research software (such as ADASS, FORCE11, and the Research Data Alliance), and community-based training in software development (for example, The Carpentries and SciCoder) and exploration (for example, .dotastro and hack days) events.

This Special Session will look back at the community-driven work that has enabled some of these changes and look forward to future horizons for the software community in astronomy. Leaders of some of these community efforts will serve on an expert panel and will share their perspectives, after which the floor will be open for discussion with participants.

Speakers
Peter Teuben, University of Maryland, College Park:  Introduction and Overview
Demitri Muna, Chief Science Data Office, NASA HQ: Software Training for Research Scientists: SciCoder and Other Efforts
Aarya Patil, Max Planck Institute for Astronomy: Building the AstroPy Community
Robert Nemiroff, Michigan Technological University: How and Why the Astrophysics Source Code Library Was Formed
Kimberly DuPrie, Space Telescope Science Institute: Lessons from Industry

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iPoster: Using the Astrophysics Source Code Library in the classroom
Alice Allen, Astrophysics Source Code Library; Kimberly DuPrie, Space Telescope Science Institute; Peter Teuben, University of Maryland, College Park; Robert Nemiroff, Michigan Technological University

Abstract: The Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL, ascl.net) is an online registry of source codes used in refereed astrophysics research. It currently lists over 3,300 codes and covers all aspects of computational astrophysics, and all of its public metadata about software can be downloaded. This presentation covers possible ways the ASCL can be used by educators and their graduate students. The ASCL serves as a discovery tool for codes that can be used for one’s own research. Graduate students can also investigate existing codes to see how common astronomical problems are approached numerically in practice, and use these codes as benchmarks for their own solutions to these problems. Further, they can deepen their knowledge of software practices and techniques through examination of others’ codes, and can use the ASCL’s data set for research on computational methods in astrophysics.

Screenshot of Using the Astrophysics Source Code Library in the Classroom iPoster

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iPoster: ASCL, ADS, and EMAC: Improving the visibility and citability of exoplanet research software
Alice Allen, Astrophysics Source Code Library; Alberto Accomazzi, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian; Joe Renaud, UMD College Park / NASA Goddard.

Abstract: The Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL, ascl.net) is a free online registry for source codes of interest to astronomers, astrophysicists, and planetary scientists. It lists, and in some cases houses, software used in research that has appeared in, or been submitted to, peer-reviewed publications. It now has over 3300 software entries and is indexed by ADS and Clarivate’s Web of Science. In 2020, NASA created the Exoplanet Modeling and Analysis Center (EMAC, emac.gsfc.nasa.gov). Housed at the Goddard Space Flight Center, EMAC serves, in part, as a catalog and repository for exoplanet research resources. EMAC currently has 223 entries, 77% of which are for downloadable software. This presentation will cover the collaborative work the ASCL is doing with EMAC and with NASA’s Astrophysics Data System (ADS) to increase the discoverability and citability of EMAC’s software entries and to strengthen the ASCL’s and ADS’s ability to serve the planetary science community.

Screenshot of ASCL, ADS and EMAC: Improving the visibility and citability of exoplanet research software iPoster

ASCL at ADASS XXXIII: Broken bones and improving the visibility and citability of exoplanet research software

ADASS is my favorite conference; it’s so favored that… well, you’ll see …

ADASS was in Tucson this year. I decided to drive from Maryland to Tucson, figuring that was likely my best way to avoid getting/bringing COVID to the conference. It’s too long a drive to do in one day, so I stayed at a campsite outside Claremore, Oklahoma one night. It was lovely! Almost deserted, lots of birds, view of the lake… perfect! But alas, when making my coffee the next morning, I tripped and fell, breaking my right arm and nose and bashing up a few other body parts. I got patched up at a local hospital (excellent care!) and had surgery two days later (more excellent care!). I couldn’t drive, of course, so what to do, what to do? A friend offered to fly to Tulsa and drive me wherever I wanted to go, suggesting “back home” would be best. Where did I want to go? Tucson, of course! I did not want to miss ADASS!! So off to Tucson we went. Once I was deposited in a hotel there, she flew back to her home. (Now that’s a friend!! I’m forever grateful!!)

I gave an oral presentation at ADASS on “Improving the visibility and citability of exoplanet research software,” this about the work the ASCL is doing with NASA’s Exoplanet Modeling and Analysis Center (EMAC) and ADS. Links to my slides and proceedings pre-print are below.

ADASS did not disappoint! I’m so glad I attended it, and also attended the IVOA meeting immediately after. Everyone was helpful and kind, as I knew they would be. I stayed in Tucson until cleared to drive, and then drove myself the 2300 miles home. Not the trip (hahahaha) I was expecting, but it was the trip that was.

Slides
Proceedings paper

ASCL poster on software citation at AAS 241

All posters at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society were iPosters: displayed on a screen instead of printed on paper or fabric. The ASCL’s iPoster is available for viewing in the iPoster Gallery; the image below is a static screenshot.

Why others might not be citing your astronomy software

Screenshot of ASCL iPoster at AAS 241

Your codes can themselves be cited, and you can choose your preferred citation method! So why aren’t people citing your code? Come find out, and also learn what five steps you can take to improve citation of the software you write.

In the past decade, software citation has accelerated in astrophysics, resulting in the field now having multiple ways to cite computational methods. Adding software metadata files, such as a CITATION.cff or a codemeta.json file, to the root directory of a GitHub repo (or other code storage site) lets others know how they should cite that software. Yet most software authors do not specify how they would like their code to be cited, while others specify a citation method that is not easily tracked (or tracked at all) by most indexers. In 2020, the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL, ascl.net) sent authors of 135 codes software metadata files (CITATION.cff and codemeta.json), tailored to each computational method, and suggested that one of these files be edited as needed and included on their code site. In early 2021, we examined the code sites for these 135 entries and found that only 41% of these sites had citation information in any form available. In mid-2021, GitHub announced the integration of CITATION.cff into its service, making it easier to add this metadata file to one’s repo. Even so, as of January, 2023, 54% of the codes registered in the ASCL do not specify how to cite use of the software. The lack of citation information creates an obstacle for article authors to provide credit to software creators, thus hindering citation of and recognition for computational contributions to research and for the scientists who develop and maintain software.

#AAS241

ASCL poster on software citation at ADASS XXXII


Are others using software you’ve written in their research and citing it as you want it to be cited? If not, this poster will help! Software can be cited in different ways, some good, and some not good at all for tracking and counting citations in indexers such as ADS and Google Scholar. Generally, indexers need to match citations to resources, such as journal articles, they ingest. There are several reasons why your code might not be cited well (in a trackable/countable way). One common reason is the lack of clear and explicit instructions on a code’s download site. Most astro code sites don’t list a preferred citation method! Make it easy for people to cite your software by listing a (good! trackable!) preferred citation method where others can easily find it. Creating a standard software metadata file, such as a CITATION.cff or codemeta.json, and adding it to the root of your code repo is easy to do with the ASCL’s metadata file creation overlay (see handout below), and will help out anyone wanting to give you credit for your computational method, whether it’s a huge carefully-written and tested package, or a short quick-and-dirty-but-oh-so-useful code.

#ADASSXXXI

Using the Astrophysics Source Code Library: Find, cite, download, parse, study, and submit

This morning, I gave a tutorial on the ASCL at ADASS XXXII, which is being held virtually from the University of Toronto and the University of Victoria. I’ll write more extensively about ADASS later this week; it is, as always, a fabulous conference with a lot of great work, talks, software, data, discussion, posters, chats, demos, tutorials… well, a lot! It’s my favorite astro conference.

But for now, slides from the tutorial and a link to the recording are below. Thanks to ADASS for accepting the proposal and to the participants for attending and for all the interesting (and occasionally scary!) comments and questions!

Slides (PDF)
Session (video)

ROSA2022: Reproducibility and Open Science in Astronomy workshop

This week, I’m attending and speaking at the ESO-sponsored Reproducibility and Open Science in Astronomy workshop. The first day was fabulous! The workshop runs through Thursday.

My talk is Opening the computational box: software sharing and the ASCL, and the abstract and links to resources mentioned in the talk are below.

Though computational methods are widely used in many disciplines, many researchers do not share the source code they develop, making their research difficult to verify and replicate. This presentation focuses on what software users and authors can do to share codes effectively, increase research reproducibility, and meet new requirements established by funders and journals. It will also cover how the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL) improves the transparency of science by registering research code, its efforts to increase software findability, and how astronomers can get credit for their codes and better support the research record.

Slides (PDF)

Journals

Journal of Open Source Software (JORS)

Astronomy and Computing (A&C)

SoftwareX

Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS)

Computing and Software for Big Science

Research Notes of the AAS

Change leaders, guidelines, and tools

SciCodes/Nine Best Practices for Software Registries and Repositories

FORCE11/FORCE11 Software Citation Principles

Research Data Alliance/FAIR for Research Software (FAIR4RS) WG

CodeMeta/CodeMeta generator

CITATION file format (CFF)/CFF INIT

CiteAs

FAIR principles

Social coding sites and archival services

Bitbucket

GitLab

GitHub

Software Heritage

Figshare

Zenodo

Other resources and fun links

Asclepias

arXiv/arXiv Next Generation

DataCite

All ASCL entries in JSON

ASCL dashboard

Generating software metadata files from an ASCL entry:
codemeta.json example
CITATION.cff example

How many GitHub repos have CITATON.cff files/codemeta.json files?

WE20211030: This week in the ASCL

The ADASS conference took place this week. The ASCL presented a poster about SciCodes at the conference. Though ADASS took up most of my time, eight new code entries, three of them submitted by their authors, were assigned ASCL IDs and moved into production. I also wrote and submitted an abstract for an iPoster presentation at the AAS’s January 2022 meeting.

ASCL poster on SciCodes consortium at ADASS XXXI

Poster describing the SciCodes consortium and how it might be of interest to astronomers

The Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL ascl.net), started in 1999, is a free open registry of software used in refereed astronomy research. Over the past few years, it has spearheaded an effort to form a consortium of scientific software registries and repositories. In 2019 and 2020, ASCL contacted editors and maintainers of academic discipline and institutional software registries and repositories in math, biology, neuroscience, geophysics, remote sensing, and other fields to develop a list of best practices for research software registries and repositories. At the completion of that project, performed as a Task Force for a FORCE11 working group, members decided to form SciCodes as an ongoing consortium. This poster will cover the consortium’s work so far, what it is currently working on, what it hopes to achieve for making scientific research software more discoverable across disciplines, and how the consortium can benefit astronomers.

Download poster (PDF)

#ADASSXXXI

Resources for SIAM CSE21 presentation on Schrödinger’s Code

I am giving a presentation at the SIAM (virtual) Conference on Computational Science and Engineering today in a Minisymposium on Data-Driven Analysis of Scientific Software Quality, Availability, and Development Productivity to discuss research we published in 2018 and the relevance of our findings to scientific software availability. A link to the slides from the presentation is below, along with links to additional information.


Slides (PDF)

Paper: Schroedinger’s Code: A Preliminary Study on Research Source Code Availability and Link Persistence in Astrophysics
Data and code

Other studies mentioned:
Collberg C., Proebsting T. and Warren A. M. 2014 Repeatability and Benefaction in Computer Systems Research: A Study and a Modest Proposal, Tech. Rep. TR 14-04 (http://repeatability.cs.arizona.edu/v2/RepeatabilityTR.pdf)

Howison J. and Bullard J. 2016 Software in the scientific literature: Problems with seeing, finding, and using software mentioned in the biology literature, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 67 2137

Mangul, S., Mosqueiro, T., Duong, D., Mitchell, K., Sarwal, V., Hill, B., Brito, J., Littman, R., Statz, B., Lam, A., Dayama, G., Grieneisen, L., Martin, L., Flint, J., Eskin, E., & Blekhman, R. 2018, A comprehensive analysis of the usability and archival stability of omics computational tools and resources, bioRxiv

Rewarding the effort involved

Funding
How to fund research software development
Essential Open Source Software for Science
DOE to Provide $12 Million for Research on Adapting Scientific Software to Run on Next-Generation Supercomputers

Recognition
Citations for software
FORCE11 Software Citation Principles
FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group
Software must be recognised as an important output of scholarly research

Career path
The Society of Research Software Engineering
US Research Software Engineer Association

Training

Better Scientific Software (BSSw)
SciCoder
Software Sustainability Institute
How to Professionally Develop Reusable Scientific Software—And When Not To

Changes in journal practices

In which journals should I publish my software?
Software with impact
An empirical analysis of journal policy effectiveness for computational reproducibility

Better support through technology

Tools for working with CITATION.cff files
Create a CodeMeta file
Getting a DOI for your code

The ASCL at the 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society

It’s that time of year again, when astronomers’ hearts and wings turn to AAS for the winter AAS meeting. This year, however, the wings are virtual; like other conferences in this time of pandemic, the 237th meeting of the AAS is online. I’m very impressed with the online meeting space, which includes a conference center with different locations to visit, a virtual exhibit hall, an iPoster gallery, and many opportunities through Slack and thoughtfully-planned activities to enable and encourage interaction between attendees, exhibitors, and presenters, including the always great Open Mic event, a highlight of the winter meeting, on Wednesday evening.

Members of the ASCL are presenting two iPosters + (the “plus” is a short Zoom session about  the poster) and an oral presentation at this meeting.

On Monday, Siddha Mavuram, an UMD student hired to do development work for the ASCL for our NASA ADAP project, is doing an iPoster + presentation titled Come search the ASCL with our new API! I also have an iPoster + presentation on Monday called Life, the Universe and Everything… you ever wanted to know about the Astrophysics Source Code Library. Though our short talks, using our posters only as our visual aids, are on Monday, our posters are available all week.

On Tuesday, Peter Teuben is presenting results of our NASA ADAP project. Though Siddha is presenting part of the development work done for this project, Peter is sharing the overall results in his oral presentation Increasing the visibility of NASA astrophysics software through the ASCL, showing how this project has made it possible to search the ASCL and ADS for NASA software through the use of keywords and, on ADS, the doctype value software. You can see these results yourself on the ASCL and with an ADS search.

Because I very cleverly failed to realize that all the links I added to the slides for my iPoster wouldn’t work once I made those slides images (doh!), I provide a PDF of these slides for download below in which most, but alas not all, of the links work. Later this week, I’ll provide a full list of links in another post that will contain all of the resources and links the ASCL is presenting this week.

Slides for Peter’s oral presentation (PDF)

Slides for Alice’s ASCL iPoster slideshow (PDF)