Software in science and engineering research: the case for open source and proper citation

Modern research in science and engineering relies heavily on software, but while academia uses citation to credit traditional research output, no such standard exists to acknowledge the effort that goes into software. In addition, written publications describing computational research, or any research that relies on computed results, cannot adequately describe the methodology of the associated work, but are only advertisements of it—sufficient scholarly output requires software to be released openly alongside traditional articles.

Motivated both by credit for research software and reproducibility in computational research, this talk will discuss principles of software citation, venues for sharing and publication of research software, and best practices for reproducibility in computational research.