Social coding and open software - What can you do to get credit for your code and to allow reuse

In this lesson we will discuss how and why to share code and data, what kind of licenses are used in what situation, and how software can be cited.

We will try to connect software licenses to FAIR principles, give practical recommendations for starting, contributing, and reusing code and help you navigating and deciding on licenses.

Why software licenses matter

  • You find some great code or data that you want to reuse for your own publication (good for the original author: you will cite them and maybe other people who cite you will cite them).

  • You need to modify the code a little bit, or you remix the data a bit.

  • When it comes time to publish, you realize there is no license.

Now we have a problem:

  • You manage to publish the paper without the software/data but others cannot build on your software and data and you don’t get as many citations as you could.

  • Or, you cannot publish it at all if the journal requires that papers should come with data and software so that they are reproducible.

This lesson is about how to avoid this situation for you and others.

Prerequisites

No computational prerequisites required for this lesson.

20 min

Social coding

30 min

Software licensing

20 min

Software citation

10 min

Sharing data

Who is the course for?

  • Someone writing their own relatively small material

  • Someone who wants to incorporate other code/libraries into their own projects

  • Group leader who wants to decide how to balance openness and long-term strategy