On Realizing the Concept Study ScienceSoft of the European Middleware Initiative Open Software for Open Science Alberto Di Meglio, Florida Estrella Morris Riedel European Center for Nuclear Research Juelich Supercomputing Centre CERN Forschungszentrum Juelich Geneva, Switzerland Juelich, Germany {Alberto.Di.Meglio,Florida Estrella}@cern.ch
[email protected] Abstract—In September 2011 the European Middleware focused on people and their publications, but do not currently Initiative (EMI) started discussing the feasibility of creating an allow collecting information about software and the open source community for science with other projects like EGI, organizations and projects developing or using it. Being able to StratusLab, OpenAIRE, iMarine, and IGE, SMEs like DCore, aggregate the power of cataloguing services of software, Maat, SixSq, SharedObjects, communities like WLCG and people and organizations, analyse trends and generate statistics LSGC. The general idea of establishing an open source and reports would provide a sound basis for judging the community dedicated to software for scientific applications was popularity of software products, enable social-networking-style understood and appreciated by most people. However, the lack of collaborations amongst users and developers, create active, a precise definition of goals and scope is a limiting factor that has cross-disciplinary communities and better promote the value of also made many people sceptical of the initiative. In order to such collaborations and their impact on science in general. understand more precisely what such an open source initiative should do and how, EMI has started a more formal feasibility Rating software and providing a means by which it can be cited study around a concept called ScienceSoft – Open Software for in a similar manner to publications and datasets would enable Open Science.