EarthCube Building Blocks: Collaborative Proposal: GeoSoft: Collaborative Open Source Software Sharing for Geosciences

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Geosciences software embodies crucial scientific knowledge, and as such it should be explicitly captured, curated, managed, and disseminated. The goal of this project is to create a system for software stewardship in geosciences that will empower scientists to manage their software as valuable scientific assets. Scientific software stewardship requires a combination of cyberinfrastructure, social infrastructure, and professional development infrastructure. The framework will result in an open transparent and broader access to scientific software to other scientists, software professionals, students, and decision makers. It will significantly improve the adoption of open data and open software initiatives, improve reproducibility, and advance scientific scholarship.The proposed research will advance knowledge and understanding of scientific software as a valuable community asset that is worth sharing, curating, cataloging, validating, reusing, and maintaining. 1) Facilitating software publication through TurboSoft, a personal assistant (analogous to TurboTax) that guides a user through best practices. Users will choose the degree of investment they are willing to make in componentizing, describing, licensing, and maintaining their software. The system will encourage open source publication, the formation of communities around the software, and set up mechanisms for software citation and credit. 2) Enabling broad software dissemination through GeoSoft, a "software commons" for geosciences that will support software contributions (prepared through TurboSoft or otherwise), software discovery through multi-faceted search, and foster social interactions through dynamic formation of communities of interest. GeoSoft will interoperate with existing software repositories and modeling frameworks in geosciences. 3) Providing just-in-time training materials through GeoCamp, an annotated collection of educational units ranging from basic education to professional training on all aspects of software stewardship. GeoCamp will be seamlessly integrated with TurboSoft and GeoSoft, and present a wide range of options for learning in the context of a user?s context of interaction with the framework or independently.