viewpoint


Sustainable software needs a change in the culture of science


For science to make the software on which it increasingly depends sustainable is a social challenge, argues Dan Katz


S


oſtware is omnipresent in science, as the scientific process becomes increasingly digital. About half the papers in recent issues of Science discuss findings that


were made using soſtware-intensive projects, and almost all the projects used soſtware at some level, ranging from system soſtware, middleware, libraries, through science gateways and web portals, to computational modelling and data analysis. In fact, scientific research is dependent on


maintaining and advancing a wide variety of soſtware. However, soſtware development, production, and maintenance are people- intensive; soſtware lifetimes are long compared with hardware; and the value of soſtware is oſten underappreciated. Because soſtware is not a one-time effort,


it must be sustained, so must be continually updated to work in environments that are changing and to solve changing, problems. Soſtware that is not maintained will either simply stop working, or will stop being useful.


Open Source and good practice Te challenge to the scientific community is how to do the work needed to make soſtware sustainable. Either reducing the amount of work, or bringing together new resources, can make this more successful. Te first is oſten thought of as using good soſtware engineering practices – with the additional benefit of making the soſtware more likely to be correct – and the second can potentially be satisfied through Open Source communities. In some sense, these are both social issues,


rather than technical ones. Te goal is to encourage soſtware developers, whatever type of soſtware they are developing, to do the extra work needed to make their own soſtware sustainable, and to build or join communities whose members work together on shared code. Te task is how to achieve this.


Career paths in software engineering In academia, in particular, this is a big challenge. Faculty members, students, postdocs, and


42 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD


staff members may all be developing scientific soſtware. However, university employees – at all levels – who are interested in both science and soſtware oſten feel compelled to leave academia because of the lack of recognition of their soſtware activities, and the lack of career paths that let them pursue their interests in a manner that they feel is sustainable. In the United States at least, some have the option of going to national laboratories and continuing in science, but many go to industry and discard their scientific interests.


Software development improves research Can we improve this situation? For staff members in UK universities at least, the concept of research soſtware engineers (www.rse.ac.uk) as a professional path is starting to be accepted, both by the university system and by the funding agencies. But as Simon Hettrick of the Soſtware Sustainability Institute explained in his article – Why we need to create careers for research soſtware engineers – published on the Scientific Computing World website in November 2015, a lot of work had to be done preparing the ground for acceptance of this idea. In other places, such as the US, universities are


trying different models to build up a critical mass of soſtware peers, such as academic computing centres like NCSA at Illinois and TACC at Texas, or integrated data-science programmes such as those at Berkeley, NYU, and Washington supported by the Moore and Sloan Foundations. Both models recognise soſtware development as a contribution that makes the university a stronger research institution.


Publishing software or papers about software? A more general change is the growing recognition that developing soſtware is a creative research process, with soſtware a research output, similar to a publication, so developers can get academic credit, and gain in academic reputation for producing soſtware. Soſtware can be published through Zenodo (https://zenodo. org, and see https://guides.github.com/activities/


Dan Katz


PUBLISHING SOFTWARE HAS THE ADVANTAGE THAT THE SOFTWARE ITSELF IS RECOGNISED


citable-code/). In addition, a number of journals now publish soſtware papers – traditional papers in the academic literature that discuss particular soſtware (www.soſtware.ac.uk/resources/guides/ which-journals-should-i-publish-my-soſtware). Publishing soſtware has the advantage that


the soſtware itself is recognised, rather than a paper about the soſtware. Publishing papers about soſtware, however, currently fits better with the established academic environment, including peer-review and indexing by tools such as Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Both models support digital object identifiers (DOI) for the soſtware, which can then be cited by others, leading to traditional academic credit, and enabling soſtware to be counted in assessment activities, such as the UK’s REF (www.ref.ac.uk). l


Daniel S. Katz (d.katz@ieee.org) is at the University of Chicago and the Argonne National Laboratory. He would like to thank Rajiv Ramnath, C. Titus Brown, and Wolfgang Bangerth for useful feedback on this article.


Some work by the author was supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), while he was working at the Foundation; however, any opinion, finding, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.


@scwmagazine l www.scientific-computing.com


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