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.
@abbycabs @biocrusoe On other tangent, I learned most of my software engineering on (non-sci) OSS projects. Certainly helped my sci coding.
— Kai Blin (@kaiblin) July 5, 2016
We heard from several users that you can even learn to build better and faster through feedback and collaboration.
@abbycabs Our OSS has created new opportunities for feedback and collaboration, and it allow us to make new projects much easier and faster.
— Max Franz (@maxkfranz) July 7, 2016
@abbycabs I thought more about reproducibility and testing. If it has to run on other people’s computers, we need to make that easy.
— Zaki (@zmughal) July 6, 2016
Connect with Others
You meet some talented and passionate folk in open source.
@abbycabs It has put me in contact with some AMAZING people who are just as passionate about science as I am.
— Rob Schaefer (@CSciBio) July 6, 2016
Strengthen your soft skills as you collaborate and communicate.
Developing software makes me really clearly communicate what I’m doing and why! Makes me confident in my results! https://t.co/bWl4vKESmu
— Kirstie Whitaker (@kirstie_j) July 5, 2016
We heard from people who build software that supports entire research communities.
@abbycabs @cloudaus all of our infrastructure is open source. We serve 5000 unique users per year globally. Good for a small community.
— Rowland Mosbergen (@rowlandm) July 5, 2016
@abbycabs I develop Linuxbrew and Homebrew-Science. It makes installing science & other software easy and repeatable https://t.co/KbiFsIHrsU
— Shaun Jackman (@sjackman) July 5, 2016
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.
However-it’s also held back my publications as I move more slowly than non-reproducible workflows-need to update reward structure @abbycabs
— Kirstie Whitaker (@kirstie_j) July 5, 2016
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.