Incentives and integration in scientific software production

Abstract

Science policy makers are looking for approaches to increase the extent of collaboration in the production of scientific software, looking to open collaborations in open source software for inspiration. We examine the software ecosystem surrounding BLAST, a key bioinformatics tool, identifying outside improvements and interviewing their authors. We find that academic credit is a powerful motivator for the production and revealing of improvements. Yet surprisingly, we also find that improvements motivated by academic credit are less likely to be integrated than those with other motivations, including financial gain. We argue that this is because integration makes it harder to see who has contributed what and thereby undermines the ability of reputation to function as a reward for collaboration. We consider how open source avoids these issues and conclude with policy approaches to promoting wider collaboration by addressing incentives for integration.

Transitive Credit as a Means to Address Social and Technological Concerns Stemming from Citation and Attribution of Digital Products

“…Issues of motivation are of particular concern today [16] as science becomes more collaborative (team science), and this leads to more-and better-science [17]. The average number of authors per publication is growing, and collaborative projects are increasingly common, which is part of the cause for the growing number of publication authors.…”

Community Code Engagements

“…The primary difference is in the incentive structure for contribution [25,26]. For open-source developers, reputation in the open-source community is a primary motivation, where the number of "followers" a developer has is a symbol of social status [13].…”

“…Although scientists are directly funded to produce new knowledge, they spend significant time searching for, using, and developing software that enables those results. The sustainability of scientific software -the ability to maintain the software in a state where scientists can understand, replicate, and extend prior reported results that depend on that software -has sometimes been an afterthought because scientists are rewarded for the publications they write, not the software they create and support [25,26]. This software, however, is a critical link in the chain of evidence establishing new scientific knowledge, and thus other scientists need to be able to run this software in order to understand and replicate this new knowledge, and apply it to new problems.…”

Unsupervised classification and visualization of unstructured text for the support of interdisciplinary collaboration

“…There is a long history of CSCW research in the domain of interdisciplinary science collaborations [27,28,31]. Distributed interdisciplinary collaborations have been studied from a CSCW perspective at several levels of analysis, including organizational forms [17], interfaces [42], and human infrastructure [33].…”