ELIXIR is launching a new initiative to bring forward software development best practices for life sciences. Working in collaboration with the Software Sustainability Institute, this new initiative will develop a guidelines and proposal for sustainable and open source policy for software development.
The initiative is open to all research infrastructures across all life science disciplines. The objective is to find common requirements in software development for life sciences, and define guidelines that could be adopted across the respective research infrastructure communities.
The kick-off meeting of this initiative will take place on 14 December 2015 in Amsterdam. ELIXIR invites all research infrastructures in biomedical sciences to take part in the meeting and nominate their representatives to take part in the meeting and the software development best practices working group.
Why open source policy
Open source and open access policies are critical to the ELIXIR mission. It is widely recognised that transparent software development from day one improves the quality of the code and associated documentation through community evaluation.
A common Open source policy will support dialogue and collaboration within scientific communities and better acknowledge individual contributions in the software development process.
An Open source strategy is also endorsed by the European Commission in its Core strategy to promote Open Access to publicly funded research results.