CW21 - 2021-03-30

Jasper - CI10-CW21

Participants

  • Morane Gruenpeter (Chair)
  • Mario Antonioletti
  • Emmy Tsang (Scribe)
  • Esther Plomp

Context / Research Domain

Software citation videos (to understand why and how to make your software citable)

Problem

Preliminary activity

  • Mario: something visual is always very appealing, base it on a theme that has been running through the workshop, need to define the right skill set required when pitching the idea, (I have no definite idea)
  • Morane: citing software is still something that isn’t very spread * There are tools available and guidelines - but people are not very good at doing it consistently * https://codemeta.github.io/ * https://codemeta.github.io/create/
  • Esther: Getting recognition for contributions/career paths?
  • Emmy: Effective and equitable storytelling. Very biased by podcast i listened to this morning + panel, but apparently it only takes 500ms for people to make up their minds about an image (hence dataviz is so important). We should stop writing. But what about people who can’t see? (that’s about the end of my chain of thoughts :p)

How should we encourage researchers to use mechanisms to cite software and have their research recognised?

Solution

Create a set of bite-size videos to get people to cite people’s software, to get people to put a CFF file in their repos/releases - with the aim to promote increasing software citability and getting recognition for research software and RSEs

YouTube videos.

  • Why make your software citable
  • How:
    • What tooling is available?
    • What is a CFF file
    • Creating CFF
    • Creating codemeta.json
    • BibTeX for software

Audience:

  • Academic researcher/RSE that needs the credit to progress in their academic career

Script idea:

  • Needs to be humanised: All the good stories have a real experience. Can we have a protagonist RSE that spent a lot of time on something and did not get recognition for it? Maybe this is too negative?
  • Protagonist: researcher working very hard on their research, a major part of their work is creating software
    • Time is not well-invested in software because the credit is only given to academic papers - coding time is considered wasted and not recognised
  • Happy person in the end!
  • Why make your software citable?
    • Potential recognition? Recognition for the time spent on working on their research software. Recognition for downstream dependencies should ideally be tied to recognition of the original piece of software
    • Software must also be available for others to use - demonstrate the impact that it makes, be able to track that impact

Aim to finish a storyboard/script, even if we can’t produce these in 1-hr

  • 3-min
  • With a cartoon?

Skill sets needed:

  • Artist & video designers
  • a good “story developer”
  • a narrator
  • A Software citation expert

Scripts brainstorm

Morane:

“Researchers all over the world are writing papers to advance research and science, these papers are counted for credit and are the “only” way to go forward in an academic career”

“At the same time, research is not only about writing results in papers, it is also about writing software to create or analyze results.”

_“Time - how much time a researcher _

Emmy:

A distressed student.

  • Protagonist: final year PhD student developing software for their research
  • Antagonist: PI and thesis committee - “where’s your paper? Why are you spending all this time working on this software?” -> Stressed student, worried about their future and career, wanting to leave academia
  • CFF comes to the rescue! WIth a CFF file, you can put in metadata about your software and allow others to easily cite your work
  • Some collaborator of antagonist PI cited student’s software - PI is very pleased with increased impact. Protagonist is able to demonstrate that his software has been reused by 1000+ others around the world and promote CFFs and research software as proper research output to peers. Protagonist is happy.

Prototype based on Emmy’s script: https://youtu.be/6R1v1bYMhZU

Licence

These materials (unless otherwise specified) are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence. Please see the human-readable summary of the CC BY 4.0 and the full legal text for further information.