NumFOCUS, IBM, and academic institutions announce Open Source Science Initiative (OSSci)

Today NumFOCUS (NF), IBM, and partner academic institutions are announcing the Open Source Science Initiative (OSSci), an impressive NumFOCUS program prioritizing the place of open source software (OSS) in scientific discovery. Review the charter here.

OSSci will serve as an avenue for connecting open science stakeholders using and developing open source software within the NF ecosystem. The facilitation of these networking opportunities will bring together individuals from NF projects, academia, government, and industry to openly collaborate on common goals.

Anthony Annunziata
Director, IBM Accelerated Discovery

“We are at a pivotal time in the evolution of open source software and scientific progress. Society has a tremendous need for faster and better science, and we’ve never had more promising technologies and tools to make that possible. But in order to pervasively accelerate science and its positive impact, we must bring the worlds of science and open source technology much closer together, to improve capability, accessibility, funding, education and beyond. Open Source Science is an initiative that seeks to do just that, and IBM is strongly behind it!”

OSSci defines a specific area of open source software community development, focused on identifying the needs of scientists contributing to and using OSS. It aims to identify gaps in existing software and fill them in by working with projects to enhance existing OSS software, and creating new OSS for science.

Kyle Cranmer
The David R. Anderson Director, American Family Insurance Data Science Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“The Data Science Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison strongly believes that open source software is at the core of data-intensive science and that fostering open source projects is key to a thriving data science ecosystem. We are excited to partner with NumFOCUS and IBM on the Open Source Science Initiative and confident that it will serve as a catalyst for collaboration and progress.”

OSSci’s work will focus on the areas of science such as chemistry, biology, and geophysics, where questions are complex and scientific discovery is the goal. Much of the existing OSS for science exists in silos under disparate grants and programs, where the wheel keeps being reinvented over and over again. OSSci seeks to become the premier home for extracting the reusable patterns in open source science and bringing all the power of OSS to science, including the strength of community, best practices of software engineering, network effects, CI/CD, and reproducibility.

Alexy Khrabrov
Open Source Science Community Director, IBM Accelerated Discovery:

“Open Source Software community has built the web and AI revolutions. HTML started as a format for scientists to exchange ideas with words and figures. We are now at a pivotal moment where scientific curiosity and OSS community dynamics fuse to accelerate research. We are looking forward to welcoming all curious minds energized by OSS to our communities of discovery for new breakthroughs, projects, and fun working together!”

Open source science is a global initiative. Science is one of the most diverse areas of human endeavor, with institutions of higher learning present in all corners of the world. We’ll build on this rich source of knowledge to ensure an equitable representation of humanity.

The mission of OSSci is to promote the idea of building, using, and connecting OSS tools in science. It will:

• serve as a catalyst for Open Source Science connections within the NF ecosystem
• support NF projects to add research expertise
• run working groups of scientists and OSS developers around the areas of science where the projects reside — materials, climate, healthcare, etc.
• build an OSSci community
• run and manage OSSci Hub, a web portal for OSSci to allow open and easily accessible stakeholder communication
• run workshops and events supporting the working groups and projects
• work on funding joint programs with public/private partnerships and government programs

The idea behind OSSci was a result of IBM Accelerated Discovery’s commitment to open science and support of its community. The work of their scientists led to the creation of the following tools to advance research by meeting the needs of scientists. These projects, as well as others potentially created through OSSci collaborations will be submitted for NumFOCUS Affiliated or Incubation status.

• Gt4sd, a toolkit for generative techniques for scientific discovery
• Ds4sd, a toolkit deep search, using massive datasets available to advance your search
• FuseMedML, medical AI applications
• Bridge, a scalability solution for linking Kubernetes to external schedulers such as HPC or Ray

OSSci will succeed on the strength of the community we build. Help us map OSS across a range of scientific disciplines, sign up for communities of discovery in your area of research, and build OSS together to accelerate science.

Josh Moore
Maintainer, Open Microscopy Environment (OME) and the Zarr projects:

“Ultimately, we hope to see digital imaging systems producing open, transparent (in other words FAIR), data without the need for further conversion. Until that time, we are committed to providing the data conversion needs of the community… we look forward to it discussing with you through the new Open Source Science (OSSci) channels.”

Go to https://opensource.science for an invitation to join the initiative and interest groups or review our Charter for more information!