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closeWe need to create incentives for software development!
Posted by fbreuer on 02 Jan 2013 at 02:01 GMT
From the article:
"Scientific software development fulfils an immediate need, but maintenance of code that is no longer relevant to your own research is a serious time sink, and will rarely lead to your next paper, or secure your next grant or position."
And this is a huge problem! We need to create solid career incentives for developing and maintaining relevant software. Because scientific software that actually has users may be far more valuable to the scientific community than a couple of papers that get a couple of citations.
RE: We need to create incentives for software development!
nicilaslimare replied to fbreuer on 30 Oct 2013 at 04:49 GMT
We try to fix that in IPOL Journal (http://www.ipol.im/) by merging "PDF" (ie text+figures) and "software" as a single published material, the "article".
We hope that this raises the visibility of the software, helps have other researchers cite the software in other research articles, integrates the software in the "academic publishing ecosystem" and at the end allows software works to be integrated in productivity metrics like citations are nowadays.
This would be an incentive to manage software more seriously and release it. But IPOL is still too young (started 2010) to draw conclusions.kkk