Open Call — Indexing FOSS Research Software Code for Climate Change: Specifically in Open Energy Modelling

Open Climate Knowledge #OCK https://github.com/petermr/climate

— Invitation to get involved! Questions or comments raise an issue on GitHub or via Twitter @Gen_R_

Intro

This call is for a first round of analysis to establish statistics on rates of FOSS licencing for code used in research software for climate change.

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Open Climate Knowledge (OCK) is an open research project with the objective to urgently make research related to climate change 100% open. Research publishing related to climate change currently appear to only be at <30% open access. (Tai and Robinson 2018)

There are two steps to enable the transition of climate change research to being fully open.

• Firstly, gathering statistics on the rates of openly licensed works and
• secondly, to create a plan and recommendations to accelerate the push forward full open licensing of research.

The OCK project started in September 2019 at the #elifesprint 2019 as a cooperation between the chemist and open access advocate Peter Murray-Rust and Simon Worthington of Generation Research.

Stats on the open research cycle

OCK has a first level focus of its work on research publications, but all aspect of the research cycle are of interest — essentially to enable open science for climate change — data, research reports, peer review, and learning, etc.

For establishing open license rates in research publishing Peter Murray-Rust has a well-established software framework openNotebook for data mining of repositories.

Analysing rates of open licencing of code (software) in open energy modelling research

Establishing statistics for open licenced software is considered more difficult for research code than research publishing.

Open Energy Modelling (OEM) is an emergent but quickly accelerating research field that relies on computer simulations. The field is extremely important to questions of low carbon and energy engineering as it enables better energy planning.

Objective with OEM and code

• To establish a method and recommendations for being able to analyses data sets to discover information on code open licencing statistics, including types and compliance. These data sets could be research repositories like Zenodo, or dedicated code repositories like Software Heritage, as well as mentions of FOSS software in research papers.
• Carry out an example search
• Document process on GitHub

Community

There are two communities that immediately come to mind who can be of assistance these are the OEM and the code indexing groups.

Open Energy Modelling

• Reiner Lemoine Institute – based in Berlin and an active open energy modelling community, https://reiner-lemoine-institut.de/
• Open Energy Modelling Initiative – https://www.openmod-initiative.org/
• Open Energy Modelling Framework – https://oemof.org/ 

Code indexing

• openNotebook from Peter Murray-Rust, see: https://github.com/petermr/openNotebook
• Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Library – https://library.cfa.harvard.edu/
• Software Heritage – https://www.softwareheritage.org/
• de-RSE Research Software Engineering – https://www.de-rse.org/en/
• FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group – https://github.com/force11/force11-sciwg
• TIB R&D – https://www.tib.eu/en/research-development/

References

Tai, Travis C., and James P. W. Robinson. ‘Enhancing Climate Change Research With Open Science’. Frontiers in Environmental Science 6 (2018). https://doi.org/10/gf64mq.