Mozilla Fellows for Science: Why developing open science software matters

At the Mozilla Science Lab, we facilitate learning around open source and data sharing to help make research more collaborative, accessible and usable. The tools and practices around open source can transform the scholarly workflow and help make research more open.

The 2016 Mozilla Fellows for Science will be taking lessons learned from open source to shift research practice in their communities to be more collaborative. To get a better idea of what this looks like day to day, we asked you how developing open source software helped your science. I had a lot of fun going through your responses, here are some of my favorites!

Learn by Building

Participating in an open source community allows for hands-on experiential learning. This is a great chance to level up your technical skills.

We heard from several users that you can even learn to build better and faster through feedback and collaboration.

Connect with Others

You meet some talented and passionate folk in open source.

Strengthen your soft skills as you collaborate and communicate.

We heard from people who build software that supports entire research communities.

Problem of Credit

While open source has moved science forward, we realize that there’s still work to be done around credit to the individual researcher. Several of you noted change that needs to take place for wider adoption of open practices.

We hope that by modelling working open, our fellows and community can bring about the culture change needed to bring credit where it’s needed.

Jump in

Apply to be a Mozilla Fellow for Science! (Deadline July 15). We’re looking for researchers who want to leverage the open web and bring open practices to their institutions.

If you’re looking to get involved in an open source project, see our collection of community run open source scientific software projects.