NASA Launches 'Open-Source Science Initiative', Urges Adoption of Open Science

In a keynote at FOSDEM 2023, NASA's science data officer Steve Crawford explored NASA's use of open-source software. But LWN.net notes that the talk went far beyond just the calibration software for the James Webb Space Telescope and the Mars Ingenuity copter's flight-control framework.In his talk, Crawford presentedNASA's Open-SourceScience Initiative. Its goal is to support scientists to help themintegrate open-science principles into the entire research workflow. Just afew weeks before Crawford's talk, NASA's Science Mission Directoratepublished its newpolicy on scientific information. Crawford summarized this policy with "as open as possible, as restrictedas necessary, always secure", and he made this more concrete: "Publicationsshould be made openly available with no embargo period, including researchdata and software. Data should be released with a Creative Commons Zerolicense, and software with a commonly used permissive license, such asApache, BSD, or MIT. The new policy also encourages using and contributingto open-source software." Crawford added that NASA's policies will beupdated to make it clear that employees can contribute to open-sourceprojects in their official capacity.... As part of its Open-Source Science Initiative, NASA has started itsfive-year Transformto Open Science (TOPS) mission. This is a $40-million mission to speedup adoption of open-science practices; it starts with the White House andall major US federal agencies, including NASA, declaring 2023 as the "Year of Open Science". One of NASA'sstrategic goals with TOPS is to enable five major scientific discoveriesthrough open-science principles, Crawford said. Interesting tidbit from the article: "In 2003 NASA created a license to enable the release of software by civil servants, the NASA OpenSource Agreement. This licensehas been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), but the Free Software Foundation doesn't considerit a free-software license because it does not allow changes to the code that come from third-party free-software projects." Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the article!

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