Report on the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2)

Creative computing with Landlab: an open-source toolkit for building, coupling, and exploring two-dimensional numerical models of Earth-surface dynamics

“…A key objective for Landlab from inception has been that the code base be sustainable (Adams et al, 2014;Becker et al, 2015;Katz et al, 2015;Stewart et al, 2010). Following other authors, we view sustainable software as that which is able to continue effectively, sustaining or improving its functionality through time while at the same time adding new users.…”

“…However, scientists who want to use an Earth-surface model often build their own unique model from the ground up, re-coding the basic building blocks of their model rather than taking advantage of codes that have already been written (Adams et al, 2014;Katz et al, 2015;Overeem et al, 2013). This undoubtedly does produce novel software capable of fulfilling its designer's needs, and can have advantages in helping the programmer to acquire a total understanding of the code base, but this approach also has many associated problems: many person hours are lost rewriting existing code, and the resulting software is often idiosyncratic, ad hoc, undocumented, and unable to interact with other software programs both in the same scientific community and beyond.…”

“…More importantly, all closed-source software also presents significant barriers to code assessment in peer review and to reproducibility of the work (Crick et al, 2014;Katz et al, 2015).…”

“…The design principles for Landlab have been guided both by our observations of current software design practices in the surface-system modelling community and by white papers issued by existing organizations both within this community (Adams et al, 2014;Overeem et al, 2013;Peckham et al, 2013) and in the scientific software design community more widely (Becker et al, 2015;Chue Hong, 2014;Katz et al, 2015;NSF, 2012). Our key observations are as follows:…”

The Challenge and Promise of Software Citation for Credit, Identification, Discovery, and Reuse

“…Multiple organizations, including the WSSSPE Software Credit working group [Katz et al, 2014[Katz et al, , 2016a and FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group [Smith et al, 2016], are working to standardize software citation practices. Some of the observations and recommendations made here come from their efforts, which follow similar work by DataCite and the FORCE11 Data Citation Synthesis Group [2014] to standardize research data citation practices.…”