Daniel S. Katz

Inspired by talks at the [International Workshop on Science
Gateways](https://sites.google.com/a/nd.edu/iwsg2018/) a few weeks ago,
in particular keynotes by David De Roure on Social Machines and Michelle
Barker on the evolution of Science Gateways, I started thinking about
what would happen if we considered all computational and data software
in the form of science gateways.

The definition of a science gateway has shifted a bit over time. In
[(Wilkins-Diehr et al 2008)](https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2008.470), it
was defined as providing "access to high-end resources such as
supercomputers and data archives through application-oriented interfaces
designed by science community members." And at that time gateways could
involve more than just the web portals that they are most often seen as
today: "science gateways typically operate through direct Web access or
downloadable client programs." Since then, the resources accessible via
science gateways have increased beyond just HPC and data, and the
interfaces have become more common. Today, a summary paper under review
by
[FGCS](https://www.journals.elsevier.com/future-generation-computer-systems/)
(Michelle Barker at al., "The Global Impact of Science Gateways, Virtual
Research Environments and Virtual Laboratories") defines science
gateways as providing "integrated access to research community resources
including software, data, collaboration tools, workflows,
instrumentation and high-performance computing, usually via Web and
mobile applications." In other words, science gateways provide easy
integrated access to integrated community resources.

We might ask: When we wouldn't want our resources to be available to
others? And when wouldn't we want the access to be easy? Could we teach
people to develop software by always starting with the idea of a user
community and what functionality they most want? Could all software be
designed with a web page as the first user interface? How do we actually
make things integrated?

All software would thus be public and accessible (and while this doesn't
solve the problem of discovery -- how users find the software they want
-- it also doesn't make it any worse than it is today.) This would be
good for reproducibility (if we figure out how to document versions and
keep old versions accessible.)

This reminds me a bit of the [Network for Computational Nanotechnology
Cyber Platform](https://nanohub.org/), (aka
[nanoHUB](https://nanohub.org/)), where a large number of computational
tools have been developed and are available to be used. These tools use
one of two interfaces. The older interface is
[Rappture](https://nanohub.org/infrastructure/rappture/wiki/Documentation),
where a developer describes the inputs and outputs of their tool in XML,
and then fills in the methods of the tool within a structure generated
based on those inputs and outputs. The newer interface is Jupyter's
[dashboard](https://github.com/jupyter/dashboards), where a user creates
a [Jupyter notebook](http://jupyter.org/) that contains their tool, then
lays out the input and output cells, and hides the other cells. Of
course, while each tool can have an integrated view of the underlying
resources, integration of the tools themselves is still a challenge.

In other words, why shouldn't we use the idea of a science gateway as a
model for all software? Why shouldn't all software be aimed at a
community of users from the start? I don't have all the answers, but
some thoughts are:

- Maybe reuse and remixing would be harder? Or could we think of
  workflows of services?
- How do we design software to be integrated?
- Is this recreating web services?
- Some people will want to do more advanced things with the software,
  but having a simple interface doesn't prevent them from digging into
  the code and developing or using another interface as well.

[Acknowledgments: Thanks to Michelle Barker and Nancy Wilkins-Diehr for
helpful comments on a draft of this post.]{.small}


Inspired by talks at the International Workshop on Science Gateways a few weeks ago, in particular keynotes by David De Roure on Social Machines and Michelle Barker on the evolution of Science Gateways, I started thinking about what would happen if we considered all computational and data software in the form of science gateways. The definition of a science gateway has shifted a bit over time.

What if all research software was a science gateway?

This short blog post is really a pointer to another post that I co-wrote
(with Sandra Gesing, Olivier Philippe, and Simon Hettrick), "[Results
from a US survey about Research Software
Engineers](http://urssi.us/blog/2018/06/21/results-from-a-us-survey-about-research-software-engineers/),"
as the initial post for the [US Research Software Sustainability
Institute (URSSI)](http://urssi.us) blog.  In brief, we ran a set of
surveys of Research Software Engineers in various countries last year,
and this post summarizes the results from the US survey.

A few interesting facts about the RSEs who responded are

- 90% write software that contributes to published research
- 82% don't have hand-over plans for their most important software
- 78% have trained others
- 75% have experience that they believe is in demand in the labor market

The complete summary is in the [URSSI blog
post](http://urssi.us/blog/2018/06/21/results-from-a-us-survey-about-research-software-engineers/),
which also includes links to the anonymized data and the Jupyter
notebook that analyzes the data.


This short blog post is really a pointer to another post that I co-wrote (with Sandra Gesing, Olivier Philippe, and Simon Hettrick), “Results from a US survey about Research Software Engineers,” as the initial post for the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) blog.

Results from a US survey about Research Software Engineers

I'm happy to announce that [I've been awarded an inaugural
fellowship](https://bssw.io/blog_posts/introducing-the-2018-bssw-fellows) from
the [Better Scientific Software (BSSw) Project](https://bssw.io), along
with my great colleagues, [Jeff Carver](http://carver.cs.ua.edu), [Ivo
Jimenez](https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~ivo/), and [Andrew
Lumsdaine](https://www.pnnl.gov/science/staff/staff_info.asp?staff_num=9045).

As a scientific software developer for 30 years and as a founder
of [Working towards Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and
Experiences (WSSSPE)](http://wssspe.researchcomputing.org.uk), my goal
under this fellowship is to make scientific software more sustainable by
providing credit to its developers via software citation, similar to how
scientists gain credit for their research via paper citations. I co-led
the [FORCE11 Software Citation working
group](https://www.force11.org/group/software-citation-working-group),
where we produced a set of [software citation
principles](https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.86), and I've been
co-leading the [FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation working
group](https://www.force11.org/group/software-citation-implementation-working-group),
where we are working with publishers and others to implement these
principles. One challenge is finding points of leverage on which to
focus implementation activities. The BSSw fellowship will give me the
opportunity to work with specific conferences and communities as such
leverage points. Specifically, I plan to work with astronomers,
physicists, and geoscientists through conferences such as
[AAS](https://aas.org/meetings/aas232),
[ACAT](https://indico.cern.ch/event/567550/),
[CHEP](http://chep2018.org), and
[AGU](https://fallmeeting.agu.org/2017/), with the repositories and
services that are used in these fields such as
[ArXiv](https://arxiv.org), [ADS](http://adsabs.harvard.edu),
[ASCL](http://ascl.net), [EarthArXiv](https://eartharxiv.org), and
[ESSoar](https://publications.agu.org/essoar-preprint-server-faqs/), and
with other organizations in these domains that are also concerned with
recognizing the role of software and its developers and maintainers in
these fields, such as [AAS](https://sites.agu.org),
[STScI](http://stsci.edu),
[AGU](https://sites.agu.org), [ESIP](http://www.esipfed.org), and
[Zenodo](https://zenodo.org).

I also want to share a slightly edited and more accurate version of the
application I submitted for the fellowship, in case it helps others
understand what I am trying to do, or those who might apply for this
fellowship in future years:

<div>

</div>

**Describe your work relevant to scientific software. (1000 -- 1500
characters)**  
  
I've been involved in writing scientific software since 1987, initially
in computational electromagnetics, later in other computational and data
science fields, including astronomy, and more recently, in computer
science (workflow systems). I've also been involved in HPC, such as
optimization and resilience. My work has generally been aimed at
improving 1) how research is done on parallel and distributed computing,
and over the last 7 or so years, 2) how research software is developed,
maintained, and sustained. I also founded Working towards Sustainable
Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE) and have
organized 8 WSSSPE workshops over the past 5 years. I have also
contributed to other topics around scientific software, such as software
citation, career paths (RSEs), software metrics, licensing, catalogs and
indexes, reproducibility, and artifact evaluation, as can be seen in my
blog: [https://danielskatzblog.wordpress.com](https://danielskatzblog.wordpress.com/).
For example, I co-founded the Journal of Open Source Software, which is
a means to implement and test the idea that publishing software enables
that software to be cited, which will leads to increased incentives to
create and maintain good software. In about 19 months, we've published
about 175 software papers, and two of them have been cited more than 60
times.  
  
**Describe your background and experience relevant to being a BSSw
Fellow. (1000 -- 1500 characters)**  
  
As an NSF program officer (2012-2016) funding software as infrastructure
projects (software developed for others to use), I realized that funding
was not sufficient to provide all the software researchers needed, and
systematic and cultural changes were needed that would encourage
developers to share and maintain their software, such as providing
credit via citation or other means that match their institution's and
community's metrics and incentives. I also attended a number of NSF
software institute (S2I2) conceptualization meetings, where this topic
of credit came up repeatedly.  And since NSF, I've been involved with
the HEP S2I2 conceptualization, and I'm a co-PI on one for GIS software,
and one for general research software (similar to the UK SSI), and these
topics keep coming up.

Simultaneously, I co-led the FORCE11 Software Citation working group,
where we produced a set of software citation principles (published as
10.7717/peerj-cs.86), and I've been co-leading the FORCE11 Software
Citation Implementation working group, where we are working with
publishers and others to implement these principles. The remaining
challenge is to find points of leverage on which to focus. The BSSw
fellowship would give me the opportunity to work with specific
conferences as such leverage points.  
  
**What would you do as a BSSw Fellow? (1000 -- 1500 characters)**  
  
I plan to work with specific domain conferences to publicize and
implement software citation principles, with the end goal of more broad
implementation. Such work has been ongoing in some fields, such as
astronomy, where the main society (AAS) and domain indexing service
(ADS) have already started down this path. To help move this further, I
will participate in AAS-231 in Jan., in a general session on software
publishing and in a co-located meeting of a Sloan Foundation funded
AAS/ADS/Zenodo project to implement this. I have also worked with
physicists at ACAT 2017
(<https://indico.cern.ch/event/567550/page/11190-presenters-information-proceedings>)
along similar lines.  In this fellowship, I will continue to work with
Astronomers via AAS, physicists via CHEP and ACAT in 2018, and will work
with AGU in their 2018 Fall meeting. For CHEP and ACAT, I will study how
the initial ACAT 2017 idea was received, and promote the idea of physics
software developers creating software references for users of their
packages to cite. For AGU, I will create a session on software
publishing and citation (working with Erin Robinson, ESIP Executive
Director) at the AGU Fall Meeting, and work with AGU to encourage
adoption of software citation standards in abstracts for AGU meetings. I
will leverage the existing "Enabling FAIR data" activity, an Arnold
Foundation-funded collaboration between AGU, data repositories, data
communities like ESIP and RDA and the publisher community, to advance
credit for science software and the adoption of software citation by
working with their [Culture Change Through Credit
Group](https://osf.io/j79fu/). Finally, a third emerging activity in
Earth science and more established in physics are preprint servers
(e.g., EarthArXiv, ESSoar.) These provide another lever to encourage
software citation in publications.

The fellowship funds will used for labor (work with these organizations)
and travel (to 3 events, one each in astronomy, physics, and Earth
sciences).

  
**What impact do you foresee from your efforts? (1000 -- 1500
characters)**  
  
My direct goal is to make software citation common in the research
community, which has the indirect goals of increasing the credit given
to software developers and maintainers, and of increasing the amount of
good quality research software made available and supported. I think the
best way to do this is to find points at which software citation can be
inserted, and to build on seeds and activities in disciplinary
communities where this topic has been raised, e.g., in astronomy through
AAS and ADS publication activities, in physics initially through ACAT
conference and through the recent HEP community white paper, and in
Earth science through AGU-led efforts currently focusing on FAIR data
but also beginning to consider software.

From a marketing perspective, we now have a set of individual innovators
and some early adopters, such as in astronomy. I will bring in more
early adopters (physics) and start to build momentum towards crossing
the chasm to the majority (Earth science) by reinforcing the early
progress that has been made and by coordinated new activities in each
community. Such directed progress in a number of communities will spill
over into other communities across channels created by multidisciplinary
research projects and topics.

To document this fellowship and its activity, I will blog about these
efforts and their results 3-6 times over the year, posted on my blog
([danielskatzblog.wordpress.com](http://danielskatzblog.wordpress.com/))
and the BSSw site.   
  


I’m happy to announce that I’ve been awarded an inaugural fellowship from the Better Scientific Software (BSSw) Project, along with my great colleagues, Jeff Carver, Ivo Jimenez, and Andrew Lumsdaine.

Messages de Rogue Scholar

What if all research software was a science gateway?

Results from a US survey about Research Software Engineers

Better Scientific Software Fellowship