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NCSA Involved In Two Projects To Receive Sloan Foundation Funding


Abstract and stylized programming code blurring into binary code in orange

Programming code abstract technology background of software developer and computer script.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is leading one project and is collaborating with another that received funding from the Sloan Foundation Technology program.

Daniel S. Katz, NCSA chief scientist

NCSA Chief Scientist Daniel S. Katz received a $350,000 grant to study how policy can be used to increase the sustainability and impact of research software in the scholarly research community. It’s one of three new awards that are kicking off implementation of the United States Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI).

“We started planning URSSI in 2018 to bring the U.S. software development and maintenance community together with users and other stakeholders,” Katz said. “It’s great to see the work we did to understand the issues, build community and make a case for the benefits of this type of work, including policy, on scholarly research, most of which today depends on research software.”

Katz and a postdoctoral researcher will examine the role of policies to: 

  • establish defined career paths for individuals in the research software field
  • improve how they are evaluated
  • incentivize contributions to public goods and infrastructure within the academic credit model
  • better recognize the value and impact of software
  • improve funding for maintenance of software
  • increase diversity in the development and maintenance communities

The postdoc position is currently open and applications are being accepted. Check out the NCSA career page for more information and how to apply.

We started planning URSSI in 2018 to bring the U.S. software development and maintenance community together with users and other stakeholders. It’s great to see the work we did to understand the issues, build community and make a case for the benefits of this type of work, including policy, on scholarly research, most of which today depends on research software.

Daniel S. Katz, NCSA chief scientist

Computational Notebooks

Kenton McHenry Portrait
Kenton McHenry, NCSA Software associate director

Kenton McHenry, associate director for software at NCSA, will serve on the steering committee for a project run by the American Geophysical Union, which received $366,850 from the Sloan Foundation Technology program to develop processes by which publishers would accept, review and publish computational notebooks as the peer-reviewed scholarly publications instead of traditional papers.

This effort builds off of the San Diego Supercomputer Center and NCSA’s EarthCube office activities that utilized an annual call for notebooks as peer-reviewed scholarly objects in order to more practically document and create more reusable software being developed within the geoscience community.

“This project is pretty exciting for us in that it takes the work we pioneered in the EarthCube effort to move forward the idea of Jupyter Notebooks as peer-reviewed scholarly objects, something that might one day replace traditional papers,” McHenry said. “This is critical in terms of scientific reproducibility today. The peer review part is also critical in that it provides incentive for the scientific community themselves to put these together and thus be scalable.

“We ran three calls for notebooks within EarthCube and the community really took to it.  The American Geophysical Union, as a large-scale publisher, will be working to take this even further.”

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