Software plays an increasingly important role in modern research. In many physical sciences, including geophysics, astrophysics, and high energy physics, research addresses phenomena occurring on extremely small or large time and space scales where experimental and observational work are difficult. In these disciplines numerical modeling, computational simulation, and data analysis are required to advance knowledge. Many researchers and developers work individually or in teams, sometimes over years or decades, to develop specialized software for modeling and data analysis, to advance both research and education. These efforts broadly benefit communities of researchers when useful codes are shared openly, but, the lack of established means to cite software is a significant barrier to sharing source code beyond the individual developer or team. Software citation gives appropriate attribution to the developers, and promotes reproducibility of results. This project brings together an interdisciplinary team of experts in library science, computational science, science and technology studies, and a computationally-intensive physical science (geophysics) to develop and test new solutions to this problem.
The team will assess the needs of the community, and will develop a software tool for citation of open source software that describes the software environment and that is embedded into workflows that software developers and researchers alike will use and find usable. Using the computational geophysics community as the community of practice this project pilots a new process for software citation that will identify and address the community's needs and remove barriers to adoption. The geophysics research community has developed extensive scientific software suites to address fundamental research on societally important problems such as earthquake systems science. By enhancing the visibility and credibility of open source software that is essential to scientific progress, the project will increase the scientific impacts of software development investments. By providing a means to credit the effort of scientists who develop software, the project will encourage the career development of talented developers and computational researchers and hence, encourage development and dissemination of better quality and better-documented software. Better quality and better documented software that can be appropriately cited helps address the challenge of reproducibility in scientific research, needed to verify and validate modeling results. Finally, improved availability and usability of software will give other scientists and researchers new tools and techniques to solve their most challenging research problems, enabling new discoveries.
