ASCL.net

The Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS) conference starts today in Trieste, Italy with two tutorials, Everything you’ve heard about Agile development is wrong by Simon O'Toole and Multi-dimensional linked data exploration with glue by Thomas Robitaille, and then the opening reception.

The ASCL has two activities at ADASS this year. I'm presenting a poster on the ASCL's growth over the past year; the poster will be featured in a separate blog post tomorrow. On Tuesday, Peter Teuben, chair of the ASCL Advisory Committee, and other ASCLers here are running a Birds of a Feather session on Implementing Ideas for Improving Software Citation and Credit; this is a follow-up of last year's session on Improving Software Citation and Credit. This year, we will look at some of the ideas that came out of last year's session along with ideas generated at the Engineering Academic Software seminar held in June, 2016 and WSSSPE4, held last month at the University of Manchester, and work to implement them. These ideas include:

• collecting and publishing stories from people who have released their software to share their experience with doing so
• updating software sites you own to explicit state how your software should be cited
• emailing code authors who don’t have clear citation instructions on their repos/code sites to suggest they make clear how their codes should be cited
• adding preferred citation methods to ASCL entries via the “Suggest a change or addition” link or sending them to associate editor Kimberly duPrie or me to add directly
• looking at your organization’s annual research activity report and suggesting ways it can specifically request software activities
• writing a document that provides guidance about the types of software contributions that add value to science
• developing guidelines for recognizing software contributions in hiring and promotion
• gathering representative research software engineering job descriptions and adding them to the AstroBetter wiki, and suggesting other ways they can be shared for use them as examples

We look forward to an interesting and productive BoF, and an interesting and productive ADASS overall. And gelato, too!