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The Unsung Heroes of Scientific Software (nature.com)
An anonymous reader sends this news from Nature: For researchers who code, academic norms for tracking the value of their work seem grossly unfair. They can spend hours contributing to software that underpins research, but if that work does not result in the authorship of a research paper and accompanying citations, there is little way to measure its impact. ... Enter Depsy, a free website launched in November 2015 that aims to "measure the value of software that powers science."
[Postdoc researcher Klaus] Schliep's profile on that site shows that he has contributed in part to seven software packages, and that he shares 34% of the credit for phangorn. Those packages have together received more than 2,600 downloads, have been cited in 89 open-access research papers and have been heavily recycled for use in other software — putting Schliep in the 99th percentile of all coders on the site by impact.
[Postdoc researcher Klaus] Schliep's profile on that site shows that he has contributed in part to seven software packages, and that he shares 34% of the credit for phangorn. Those packages have together received more than 2,600 downloads, have been cited in 89 open-access research papers and have been heavily recycled for use in other software — putting Schliep in the 99th percentile of all coders on the site by impact.
Yes, he chose to do it, but it's a choice that for many people means the end of their academic career. There's a huge amount of great scientific software coming out of the universities, but it tends to count very little toward a new faculty's tenure review. If you don't get tenure; you're fired. The unique issue for software is that it takes a very long time to write well and drains resources for its maintenance. For tenure, you're typically evaluated on your ability to get grants, research papers, departmental service (conferences and research groups), and teaching in about that order, though, it varies. Notice that software isn't in there. Yes, you can get a publication out of a piece of scientific software, but you're really looking at a single paper, or 2-3 if you really milk it. Tenure track faculty need to be publishing 5-10 papers per year over the traditional 7 year probationary period.
Now, is this a cultural problem at universities? Absolutely. But those of us in this situation have every reason to gripe. It's not that we're not getting paid. It's that we're running the very real possibility that we're going to get fired after providing an extremely valuable service to the greater community.