Showing posts with label Scientific Software. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scientific Software. Show all posts
Thursday, February 20, 2020
Is the scientific paper outdated ?
There is a provoking paper by Ryan Abernathey (GS) that appeared on The Chronicle of Higher Education which is entitled: The Scientific paper is outdated. The Author explains why, in his opinion.
I read it and I fully agree with the arguments. I dedicated part of my last 25 year of research in producing good designed software and I know that I sacrificed more than a paper to this task. Fortunately journals like GMD or EM&S built a bridge between paper writing and software building. The Author realizes also that just publishing software should be enough in most of the cases, but he is probably unaware that now this is actually possible with Joos, a new type of "journal" which is also commented here.
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Scientific Software's Myths
In preparing the work of the new Ph.D. student that will arrive this fall, I think a reading of there two posts "The myths of bioinformatics software" by Dr. Lior Pachter (GS) and the response by Dr. Titus Brown (GS) can help a lot. While I do not marry the negativist attitude of Patcher, I cannot deny that many of his statements are, in my experience, correct. I endorse more Brown's position, however.
I suggest that Ph.D. applicants look carefully both the positions (and the intricate series of links). For me, I certainly remain with GPL. At the same time, I would warn the applicants that I am oscillating towards a thesis topic which would sound like "Design Patterns for Hydrology" (not forgetting, certainly what I wrote on GEOtop 3.0).
P.S. -I also totally endorse this Brown's statement: "From my few involvements with working on non-free software, I would also add that selling software is a tough business, and not one that automatically leads to any profits; there's a long tail, just as with everything else, and I long ago decided that my time is worth more to me than the expected income from selling software would be. (I would be thrilled if a student wanted to try to make money off of our work, but my academic work would remain open source.)". I saw so many colleagues that believe they can sell their software or keep it close, failing miserably and missing the leadership they could have. I know also some remarkable exceptions though (Hydrus, Flo2D especially).
I suggest that Ph.D. applicants look carefully both the positions (and the intricate series of links). For me, I certainly remain with GPL. At the same time, I would warn the applicants that I am oscillating towards a thesis topic which would sound like "Design Patterns for Hydrology" (not forgetting, certainly what I wrote on GEOtop 3.0).
P.S. -I also totally endorse this Brown's statement: "From my few involvements with working on non-free software, I would also add that selling software is a tough business, and not one that automatically leads to any profits; there's a long tail, just as with everything else, and I long ago decided that my time is worth more to me than the expected income from selling software would be. (I would be thrilled if a student wanted to try to make money off of our work, but my academic work would remain open source.)". I saw so many colleagues that believe they can sell their software or keep it close, failing miserably and missing the leadership they could have. I know also some remarkable exceptions though (Hydrus, Flo2D especially).
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