The 2nd Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences is to be held in conjunction with SC14, Sunday, 16 November 2014, New Orleans, LA, USA.
Progress in scientific research is dependent on the quality and accessibility of software at all levels and it is critical to address challenges related to the development, deployment, and maintenance of reusable software as well as education around software practices. These challenges can be technological, policy based, organizational, and educational, and are of interest to developers (the software community), users (science disciplines), and researchers studying the conduct of science (science of team science, science of organizations, science of science and innovation policy, and social science communities).
The WSSSPE1 workshop (http://wssspe.researchcomputing.org.uk/WSSSPE1) engaged the broad scientific community to identify challenges and best practices in areas of interest for sustainable scientific software. At WSSSPE2, we invite the community to propose and discuss specific mechanisms to move towards an imagined future practice of software development and usage in science and engineering. The workshop will include multiple mechanisms for participation, encourage team building around solutions, and identify risky solutions with potentially transformative outcomes. Participation by early career students and postdoctoral researchers is strongly encouraged.
We invite short (4-page) actionable papers that will lead to improvements for sustainable software science. These papers could be a call to action, or could provide position or experience reports on sustainable software activities. The papers will be used by the organizing committee to design sessions that will be highly interactive and targeted towards facilitating action. Submitted papers should be archived by a third-party service that provides DOIs. We encourage submitters to license their papers under a Creative Commons license that encourages sharing and remixing, as we will combine ideas (with attribution) into the outcomes of the workshop.
The organizers will invite one or more submitters of provocative papers to start the workshop by presenting highlights of their papers in a keynote presentation to initiate active discussion that will continue throughout the day.
Areas of interest for WSSSPE2, include, but are not limited to:
- defining software sustainability in the context of science and engineering software
- how to evaluate software sustainability
- improving the development process that leads to new software
- methods to develop sustainable software from the outset
- effective approaches to reusable software created as a by-product of research
- impact of computer science research on the development of scientific software
- recommendations for the support and maintenance of existing software
- software engineering best practices
- governance, business, and sustainability models
- the role of community software repositories, their operation and sustainability
- reproducibility, transparency needs that may be unique to science
- successful open source software implementations
- incentives for using and contributing to open source software
- transitioning users into contributing developers
- building large and engaged user communities
- developing strong advocates
- measurement of usage and impact
- encouraging industry¹s role in sustainability
- engagement of industry with volunteer communities
- incentives for industry
- incentives for community to contribute to industry-driven projects
- recommending policy changes
- software credit, attribution, incentive, and reward
- issues related to multiple organizations and multiple countries, such as intellectual property, licensing, etc.
- mechanisms and venues for publishing software, and the role of publishers
- improving education and training
- best practices for providing graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in domain communities with sufficient training in software development
- novel uses of sustainable software in education (K-20)
- case studies from students on issues around software development in the undergraduate or graduate curricula
- careers and profession
- successful examples of career paths for developers
- institutional changes to support sustainable software such as promotion and tenure metrics, job categories, etc.
Submissions:
Submissions of up to four pages should be formatted to be easily readable and submitted to an open access repository that provides unique identifiers (e.g., DOIs) that can be cited, for example http://arXiv.org or http://figshare.com.
Once you have received an identifier for your self-published paper from a repository, submit it to WSSSPE2 by creating a new submission at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wssspe2, and entering:
- Author information for all authors
- Title
- Abstract (with the identifier as the first line of the abstract, for example, http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.791606 or http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.7414 or alternative)
- At least three keywords
- Tick the abstract only box Do not submit the paper itself through EasyChair; the identifier in the abstract that points to the paper is sufficient.
Deadline for Submission:
14 July 2014 (any time of day, no extensions)
Travel Support
Funds are available to support participation in WSSSPE2 by 1) US-based students, early-career researchers, and members of underrepresented groups; and 2) participants who would not otherwise attend the SC14 conference. Priority will be given to those who have submitted papers and can make a compelling case for how their participation will strengthen the overall workshop and/or positively impact their future research or educational activities.
Submissions for travel support will be accepted from September 1st to September 15th 2014 following instructions posted on the workshop web site.
Financial support to enable this has been generously provided by
1) the National Science Foundation and
2) the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Important Dates:
- July 14, 2014 Paper submission deadline
- September 1, 2014 Author notification
- September 15, 2014 Funding request submission deadline
- September 22, 2014 Funding decision notification
- November 16, 2014 WSSSPE2 Workshop2