User:Leo Lahti/OSS

Scientific Open Source Software

Computational scientists can advance the development and wide-spread adoption of reproducible research standards by making computational code available to others through convenient implementations and working to ensure that the research data is released in the public domain. The lack of free and transparent access to research material, including data, computational experiments, and results has been a major bottleneck in computational studies.

To promote reproducibility in computational science, I am actively releasing general-purpose implementations of probabilistic algorithms. Some of the key tools include algorithms for dependency modeling, genomic data integration, functional network analysis, and microarray analysis. Some of these tools have been contributed to the Chipster bioinformatics analysis platform maintained by the Finnish IT Center for Science (CSC). The soRvi Algorithmic toolbox for open government data in Finland received double award in the Apps4Finland 2011 Data Opening Category: both the official competition and the public votes. See the list of publications for a comprehensive list of algorithms.

Let us continue and remove artificial barriers from reusing research material to make the newest computational techniques easily available to spark new applications and further development. To start releasing your scientific code, a variety of open licenses are available; I have collected a brief memo on open licensing of scientific material to help with choosing a suitable open license for academic purposes.