Open Source in Academia Map#
This notebook is an aid for navigating the ecosystem of open source within academia.
Open source software is everywhere. In an academic context, it can be used either for research software, within an ed tech context used by the administration, or as a topic of instruction to students. Open source also is built into all layers of software used by academics, as well of industry at large. It can also be an object of study for researchers seeking to learn more about code generation and usage, collaborative networks, and so on.
The many areas where open source can apply means that navigating the landscape of open source software can be difficult to practitioners looking to specialize in open source as a whole.
SustainOSS is a community of people who hold space for conversations around the long term sustainability of both open source code and the communities that build and use it. As part of this work, the Academic working group meets in order to discuss sustainability issues within open source. This website is meant to function as a starting point for discussions and links to other communities, universities, and researchers working on open source, and as a list of resources for practictioners.
How to use this website#
At its heart, this is a simple Jupyter notebook that can display information in a structured format. Jupyter Notebooks have a long history of use in the sciences for documenting software and research methods - there are also other groups, like The Turing Way, that use these notebooks for providing resources on how to work collaboratively in the open.
Current Sections#
At the moment, we have these sections:
Universities. This is meant to cover universities which have a formal relationship with open source. While many universities have an open access or open research policy, sometimes publicly available, and while many universities have researchers who use or work on open source, only a few universities have allocated funding for a lab, department, library resources, or staff to work on open source issues. Sometimes, this takes the form of an Open Source Program Office (OSPO), but not always, and this appelation covers a variety of tasks that the university may already be doing in a formal manner.
Organizations. There are many groups which work on open source within an academic or research context. Sometimes, these are foundations which do work academically - or, they could just be user groups or special interest groups that meet to discuss in a less formal manner.
Service Providers. Some projects are academically-adjacent, in that they provide resources to OSS projects in academia. This is for organizations like this.
Funders. Understanding the funding landscape is crucially important to OSS projects and academic, and differs based on location and field.
Contribute#
This work cannot be done by a single person or a single team. There are several ways to contribute:
Open an issue to add data. If you are unsure how to use Git easily or you are unsure where something goes, just open an issue with your suggestions or comments.
Add a page directly to the Git repository using a Pull Request. The GitHub repo is here. If you have a university, community, or so on, and you know how to use Git and GitHub, please open a PR with the resource!
Complain. If this isn’t working for you, tell us why, and we’d be more than happy to work to make it better.
Join the regular calls. We meet every fourth Thursday. These are announced in the Sustain Discourse.
Send an email. Richard Littauer is the main editor for this repository, at the moment, and he’s happy to incorporate any changes or to build a more welcoming and inclusive structure for collaboration here if any of the above options is less than ideal. Email richard@sustainoss.org.