Using peer review to support development of community resources for research data management

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 1.0 Public Domain Dedication. The definitive version was published in Journal of eScience Librarianship 6 (2017): e1114, doi:10.7191/jeslib.2017.1114.To ensure that resources designed to teach skills and best practices for scientific research data sharing and management are useful, the maintainers of those materials need to evaluate and update them to ensure their accuracy, currency, and quality. This paper advances the use and process of outside peer review for community resources in addressing ongoing accuracy, quality, and currency issues. It further describes the next step of moving the updated materials to an online collaborative community platform for future iterative review in order to build upon mechanisms for open science, ongoing iteration, participation, and transparent community engagement.DataONE is supported by US National Science Foundation Awards 08- 30944 and 14-30508, William Michener, Principal Investigator; Matthew Jones, Patricia Cruse, David Vieglais, and Suzanne Allard, Co-Principal Investigators

Community Organizations: Changing the Culture in Which Research Software Is Developed and Sustained

Software is the key crosscutting technology that enables advances in mathematics, computer science, and domain-specific science and engineering to achieve robust simulations and analysis for science, engineering, and other research fields. However, software itself has not traditionally received focused attention from research communities; rather, software has evolved organically and inconsistently, with its development largely as by-products of other initiatives. Moreover, challenges in scientific software are expanding due to disruptive changes in computer hardware, increasing scale and complexity of data, and demands for more complex simulations involving multiphysics, multiscale modeling and outer-loop analysis. In recent years, community members have established a range of grass-roots organizations and projects to address these growing technical and social challenges in software productivity, quality, reproducibility, and sustainability. This article provides an overview of such groups and discusses opportunities to leverage their synergistic activities while nurturing work toward emerging software ecosystems

Building, Growing and Sustaining Global Collaborative Communities

Agile, interconnected and diverse communities of practice can serve as a hedge on an uncertain world. We currently live in an era of populist politics and diminishing government funding, challenging our collective optimism for the future. However, the communities we build and contribute to can be prepared and strengthened to address the challenges ahead. How we choose to operate in this world of less funding is tied to the collective impacts we all believe we can achieve by working together. How we choose to work together and structure our communities matters

Building, Growing and Sustaining Global Collaborative Communities

Agile, interconnected and diverse communities of practice can serve as a hedge on an uncertain world. We currently live in an era of populist politics and diminishing government funding, challenging our collective optimism for the future. However, the communities we build and contribute to can be prepared and strengthened to address the challenges ahead. How we choose to operate in this world of less funding is tied to the collective impacts we all believe we can achieve by working together. How we choose to work together and structure our communities matters

Supporting Open Source leaders in Aotearoa

New Zealand has been the birthplace of a number of high profile Open Source Software (OSS) projects and many smaller niche projects. This BoF session will be an open conversation around the challenges and opportunities present when creating open source communities in New Zealand and around the world, and what support open source leaders need to be successful. What resources, support systems, financial structures, talent pathways and other supporting infrastructure could unlock a flourishing of open source projects in and around science in Aotearoa? What could research institutions, businesses and government departments do to encourage more open source approaches? How can the philanthropic sector learn about open source models and support their impact? In science, OSS projects often start based on addressing a scientific problem, they work to develop a solution in software and share that with a broader community. Many open source developers have a choice to make about whether they want to “go-big”, or “stay-small” as their software gains traction and users. Our research is exploring this decision point, and the ways in which projects all over the world have right-sized their projects to deliver the impacts their communities crave. We’re looking at how projects have succeeded and failed in the past, and working to support new leaders to learn from past mistakes. After a brief presentation outlining our research efforts, we’ll describe a recently funded project supporting this research, and a cohort based learning, and global Community of Practice development. Together we’ll collaboratively brainstorm past successes and failures in OSS in NZ, uncover what interesting open source efforts are underway today and explore possible futures where we can better support open source leaders in Aotearoa. This will be an engaging, inclusive and open discussion to bring together open source advocates, leaders and supporting institutions to ask: “How could we support people to generate a flourishing of Open Source Software by and for Aotearoa?” All are welcome who share in a drive to bring open source impacts to the world from the shores of Aotearoa. References: Understanding Scientific Open Source Software (OSS) Project Leadership – https://orgmycology.com/understanding-oss-project-leadership/ ABOUT THE AUTHORJonah has acted as an organizational leader in software and information systems at private sector companies, universities, and international non-profit organizations worldwide. He's worked to sustain the international non-profit The Carpentries, acting as the chief executive of Software Carpentry and Director of Membership at the follow-on organization, The Carpentries, an impact-driven global volunteer coordination organization. He built innovation spaces, innovative computing environments, and a research informatics team that increased extramural funding competitiveness at The University of Oklahoma. He has worked inside the hyper-growth software company to help advise and structure how skill development and learning are built into the fabric of a globally operating company. As a consultant, he’s advised and facilitated for The Veracity Lab, MolSSI (Molecular Science Software Institute), OMSF (Open Molecular Science Foundation) g0v (Gov Zero) Aotearoa, FutureBees NZ, and Walk Together Aotearoa on their structures, activities, impact, growth, and approaches to sustainment. Jonah received his MS in Forestry and Natural Resources in 2008, and a B.S. in Physics in 2001, both from Purdue University.For more information about eResearch NZ / eRangahau Aotearoa, visit:https://eresearchnz.co.nz/</p

Using Backcast Land-Use Change and Groundwater Travel-Time Models to Generate Land-Use Legacy Maps for Watershed Management

We couple two spatial-temporal models, a backcast land-use change model and a groundwater flow model, to develop what we call "land-use legacy maps." We quantify how a land-use legacy map, created from maps of past land use and groundwater travel times, differs from a current land-use map. We show how these map differences can affect land-use planning and watershed management decisions at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Our approach demonstrates that land-use legacy maps provide a more accurate representation of the linkage between land use/cover and current water quality compared to the current land-use map. We believe that the historical signatures of land-use impacts on current water quality should be considered in land-use planning and watershed management

Assessing migration patterns in Passerina ciris using the world’s bird collections as an aggregated resource

Natural history museum collections (NHCs) represent a rich and largely untapped source of data on demography and population movements. NHC specimen records can be corrected to a crude measure of collecting effort and reflect relative population densities with a method known as abundance indices. We plotted abundance index values from georeferenced NHC data in a 12-month series for the new world migratory passerine Passerina ciris across its molting and wintering range in Mexico and Central America. We illustrated a statistically significant change in abundance index values across regions and months that suggests a quasi-circular movement around its non-breeding range, and used enhanced vegetation index (EVI) analysis of remote sensing plots to demonstrate non-random association of specimen record abundance with areas of high primary productivity. We demonstrated how abundance indices from NHC specimen records can be applied to infer previously unknown migratory behavior, and be integrated with remote sensing data to provide a deeper understanding of demography and behavioral ecology across time and space