This post is inspired by a post from C. Titus Brown, where Titus asked “What do you think about the term & practice of ‘hardening software’?” and a few of us used comments to discuss the concept. What is hardening?

Measuring software impact is important, for a variety of reasons, and a variety of people, including software creators, their employers, their funders, potential users of the software, and academics studying software and science.  This topic has been studied by many, including some nice work by Thain, Tannenbaum, and Livny about 10 years ago. What should we count?

*This viewpoint is published jointly on software.ac.uk, hpcnotes.com (personal blog), danielskatzblog.wordpress.com (personal blog) under a CC-BY licence. It was written by Neil Chue Hong (Software Sustainability Institute), Simon Hettrick (Software Sustainability Institute), Andrew Jones (NAG), and Daniel S. Katz (University of Chicago &

Daniel S. Katz and Rajiv Ramnath, National Science Foundation {dkatz, rramnath}@nsf.gov (A white paper for the Computational Science &

This post is meant to summarize the “Our Scholarly Recognition System Doesn’t Still Work” p anel, held at the Science of Team Science Conference (SciTS), Friday, June 5, 2015, Bethesda, Maryland, USA The panel organizers were Daniel S. Katz (U. of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory), Amy Brand (Digital Science), Melissa Haendel (Oregon Health &

In response to Doug Thain’s question: What currently-available tools do you recommend for enabling reproducible scientific computing?  Is there a tool that we ought to have, but do not? P.S. I am using “reproducibility” as an easy shorthand for re-usability, re-creation, verification, and related tasks that have already seen some discussion.  Please interpret the question broadly.

Eric Lander, who co-chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) for the White House, gave a great talk at the 2015 National Math Festival in Washington, DC on April 16th, called “The Miracle Machine.”  The full talk is available from this page, specifically as a Word document.  Eric’s abstract was: Many governments are currently redirecting money for basic research into more applied areas.

(This is taken in part from another blog post.  Doug Thain asked a few of us to participate in a group blog on reproducibility, and this was my initial post on that blog.) Given my two roles, a researcher and a funder, it’s clear to me that reproducibility in science is increasingly seen as a concern, at least a high level. And thus, making science more reproducible is a challenge that many people want to solve.

Once again, I’m writing in response to Titus Brown, who answered Is software a primary product of science? with “no” in his blog and on Twitter: Note that Titus cleverly changed the question from asking about research to asking about science. Perhaps we can combine these and think about scientific research. So, what are primary products of scientific research?

This post is written in response to a recent article: “Beyond authorship: attribution, contribution, collaboration, and credit,” Learned Publishing 28(2), April 2015 (DOI: 10.1087/20150211). As a member of the CASRAI working group who “provided critical review of the [contributorship] taxonomy,” I am generally supportive of this idea of better and identifying contributions to scientific works.