The Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) project is an extensive platform for software curation and preservation. Beyond its core functionality, which builds and curates “virtual machines” that can execute any piece of archived software, regardless of the hardware on which it was originally designed to run, the project has responded to demand from partners and developed critical services like a hosted “reading room” for library CD-ROM collections and a Universal Virtual Interactor that can open any digital file natively in the appropriate application (and version) in which it was created. Anchored at the Yale University Library, the project team led by digital preservation manager Euan Cochrane and software preservation program manager Seth Anderson has built out a robust open source codebase, which in addition to production use at Yale has been piloted at 15 other universities and is being adopted by initiatives in Canada and Australia.   This grant supports the continued development and expansion of the EaaSI platform as it matures and moves towards long term sustainability.  Grant funds will support three streams of work: maintenance of the existing EaaSI services; development of automation and other approaches to lower costs for and appeal to new institutional users (with an emphasis on the archiving of computational research pipelines); and market development toward long term sustainability.

In 2020, the Sloan Foundation provided support for an effort led by the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Stephen Jacobs to design and launch an undergraduate-anchored program—LibreCorps—to support faculty software projects across the RIT campus. Aimed at both eliciting demand for and establishing the value of open source software projects, LibreCorps is an experiential learning program where students are deployed to work on real world open source software and data projects, supporting faculty partners with direct software development as well as community management, documentation, design, and other forms of non-code contribution. This pilot was successful, with LibreCorps having supported at least 24 faculty-driven software projects on topics ranging from computational astrophysics to ecology to data visualization to cybersecurity to Deaf education.   Funds from this grant provide continuing support for this effort under the broader Open@RIT initiative, supporting two core staff members who are tasked with building relationships, scoping projects, triaging requests, and otherwise ensuring that the program runs smoothly.

This grant funds efforts to develop and launch a set of core activities to support open source software engineering projects across CMU. Planned activities include creating a formal structure for managing software developer relations across the university, mapping the current open source activity across campus, and identifying opportunities which could simultaneously address faculty research needs and student training (including support for undergraduate research experiences).   In addition, the new CMU Open Source Program Office will leverage relationships with key collaborators at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), a fully integrated Federally Funded R&D Center (FFRDC), and produce guidance and best practices for the development and maintenance of open source scientific software in the context of intramural federal research organizations. It will also explore how to support open source software developed to interface with a new “Cloud Laboratory” core facility on campus.

This grant supports Ekaterina Holdener at St. Louis University who is establishing an Open-Source Software Center (OSS Center) at the university that will, among other activities, launch a program to facilitate graduate students and undergraduate student participation in faculty-driven open-source research software projects. Over the grant period, Holdener anticipates that the new program will allow at least 120 student contributors to support some 30 faculty-driven software projects. Additional funds will pay for a host of other activities designed to support the new OSS Center, including the development of organizational infrastructure and systems, requirements and design checklists, the publication of a playbook of OSS Center-related activities and programs on building open-source software capacity in university settings; and the training of an estimated 16 graduate student in computer science, data science, and software engineering. Funds will provide financial support for Holdener, 16 graduate student employees, and a full-time program director.