Todayβs universe of open source communities has immense potential to amplify the impact of scientific research. Thanks to a generous grant by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the OSPO UC Santa Cruz is being established to provide a center of gravity that brings together everything needed to unlock that potential.
The OSPO’s mission is to create partnerships with stakeholders within and outside the UC system to promote open source literacy and best practices, helping students learn from open source communities, letting scientists use open source to accelerate research efforts, and connecting students and scientists with sponsors from industry, government, and foundations.
Through a number of continually refined programs that are designed to amplify impact of the UC research enterprise the OSPO is building a community of practitioners who aim to create and share knowledge, collaborate on practices, tools, and other ways to run successful and effective open source research efforts.
Representatives from the UC OSPO Network were among those invited to attend the Second Annual OSPO for Good discusions at the UN Headquarters in New York.
With funding from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the UCSC OSPO is leading a six campus effort to institutionalize the OSPO approach throughout the UC System.
Summer 2024 OSRE supporting 40 students working on Open Source and Reproductivity Thanks to the support from the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the National Science Foundation FAIROS RCN program, the UCSC OSPO has matched 40 students with mentors to contribute to open source and reproducibility this year.
Open source research efforts within the University of California face many challenges, including
The UCSC OSPO effort was founded by Carlos Maltzahn and Stephanie Lieggi in 2022 under an Alfred P Sloan Foundation Grant. The effort continues under the leadership of Lieggi and Faculty Director James Davis, along with OSPO incubator fellow Emily Lovell. The UCSC OSPO team, along with partners at other UC campuses, is
The UCSC OSPO mission is to leverage open source to expand the reach and impact of research coming from throughout the UC system.
The Open Source Research Experience (OSRE) program by the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) UC Santa Cruz provides support for undergraduate and graduate students contributing to open source research efforts. The goal of the program is to seed contributor communities of open source research efforts and to help make computational research efforts reproducible. With this program the OSPO participates as mentor organization in Google Summer of Code and other outreach and sponsorship programs. The OSRE 2023 introduced the Summer of Reproducibility (2023, 2024).
This program supports the work of postdoctoral scholars aiming to create and grow productive open source contributor communities around innovative research prototypes in order to amplify the impact of their research. To be considered for this program, a postdoctoral scholar should have a research prototype with significant open source software or hardware infrastructure and a UC Santa Cruz-based faculty mentor.