Created by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) and first released in 2023, STRUDEL is a planning framework and design system of research software workflows that distills best practices in interface and user experience (UX) design discovered and refined from more than a decade of project work by LBNL researchers.  This grant provides funding for coordinated efforts between UC Berkeley Institute of Data Science (BIDS) / LBNL, Superbloom, The Carpentries, and 2i2c to grow the awareness and adoption of STRUDEL among scientific software developers as the platform moves towards financial independence and sustainability.  Funded activities over the grant period include iterative expansion and improvement of STRUDEL based on community feedback, outreach to user communities from diverse institutions, development of platform infrastructure for training and outreach events, and new curriculum on UX design leveraging The Carpentries model.

The Community for University and Research Institution OSPOs (CURIOSS) provides dedicated network-level resources to facilitate information sharing between Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) in academic and research institutions. Having served a critical role in defining the landscape and onboarding Sloan’s grantees into a larger community of practice in which they can compare ideas and learn from each other, the CURIOSS team is positioning to thoughtfully grow the community well beyond non-Sloan-funded OSPOs, connecting those new entrants to best practices. With this multi-year grant, they will continue to hold space for candid information exchange via monthly community calls and yearly in-person meetings of the active members but will also grow opportunities to engage with external like-minded individuals, departments, and organizations. Finally, they will build on the success of their resource development, supporting individual members who volunteer to lead working groups to create case studies, training materials, and other collaboratively authored documents.

Over the past two years, the Vermont Research Open Source Program Office (VERSO) has encouraged open source software development at the University of Vermont by supporting hundreds of faculty and students on campus, engaging with close to 70 companies and local community organizations, building strong intra-university relationships with the offices of technology transfer and the Vice Provost for Research, and adopting a model for student-driven clinical work on specific open source development projects. This grant provides two years of continued support for these activities as VERSO moves towards institutionalization and independent sustainability as part of the Vermont Complex Systems Institute and the office of the Vice President for Research. Grant funds will provide continuing core operating support, as well as initial salary support for a new Research Software Engineer position. VERSO expects that, after the two-year runway of grant funding, a combination of dedicated internal funding, external grants, state/government partnerships, and industry support will cover all core operating costs, with student and software engineering support expanding elastically as demand increases.

This grant provides two years of continuing support for the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) at Saint Louis University (SLU), as part of the Sloan Foundation’s ongoing efforts to institutionalize support for open source software in the research enterprise. SLU has found particular success in integrating open source into the student experience. Their key innovation has been in developing support for faculty-driven open source research software through a scaffolded system of paid graduate (masters) students who mentor undergraduate students participating in a capstone Computer Science class. In 2023, every graduating undergraduate Computer Science major at SLU engaged substantively with open source software development through this program. Grant funds will be used to continue these core activities as well as to expand and institutionalize the OSPO inside SLU.  Planned activities include transitioning the training for graduate students in practical open-source skills to a for-credit capstone/educational requirement. The leadership team also plans to develop revenue streams from both faculty-driven external grants and industry partnerships, and to develop a reserve fund to buffer against the ups and downs of external funding.

Scientists are exploring the use of generative artificial intelligence for a number of tasks both general to the scientific process and specific to different disciplines: hypothesis generation, literature review, peer review, and software production. This grant supports a study of the latter by University of Michigan researcher Elle O’Brien, focusing on how individual scientists and scientific groups/labs are adopting and deploying Generative Artificial Intelligence products and services when collaboratively coding and developing scientific software. The three-phase research design will begin with qualitative interviews and observations, followed by a survey and set of ethnographic case studies. O’Brien will document the current use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in scientific software production broadly, as well as focus on specific practices such as verifying code and translating from one programming language to another, exploring themes of trust and collaboration.

Founded in 2019, the Research Software Alliance (ReSA) aims to catalyze community-led collaborations within the research software engineering community to address global challenges associated with the development and maintenance of research software. Funds from this grant support three activity areas over the next two years. First, ReSA will establish two ongoing fora targeting important groups within the broader software engineering ecosystem, providing a venue for these communities (like National RSE associations, publishers exploring software review, or research infrastructure providers) to regularly meet, surface common challenges, and propose and discuss solutions.  Second, ReSA will begin initial planning and foundation-setting for convening the first ever international research software conference, to be held in 2025 or 2026.   Finally, ReSA will create a micro-grant program, making small grants available for community-led meetings on a diverse array of international issues that, if fruitful, could blossom to become official ReSA task forces addressing pressing global challenges in research software development. Grant funds will support salary of key ReSA staff, travel, and seed funding for the micro-grants program.

This grant builds on the success of the University of California, Santa Cruz OSPO to support open source software development across six University of California campuses--Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Diego. Th network will engage UC faculty and student work on open source software, pooling resources to avoid duplication of efforts across the state, while at the same time leveraging the unique local strengths of each partner campus. Each of the participating UC campuses will receive some base funding to tap local capacity, build relationships and engagement, and launch an Open Source Project Office over the two-year grant period, while in addition Santa Cruz will support network-level coordination and a system-wide Open Source Leadership Group (OLG). Grant funds will also support the development of a platform for discovering and tracking open source software across the UC system, a set of practical tools to assess the sustainability of open source projects, and a pilot “containerization as a service” capacity that will make open source software more accessible and usable across the UC system.