Open Science Best Practices for Source Code Preservation

<!--HTML--><p><strong>Abstract:</strong></p><p>Software has become a key part of most scientific experiments, throughout all fields of knowledge. In order to overcome the so-called reproducibility crisis in science, particular attention should be devoted to how we handle software source code in the context of scientific experiments. In this lecture we will discuss this problem and present the state of the art in open science best practices for identifying, archiving, retrieving, and verifying the source code of software related to scientific experiments. We will devote particular attention to Software Heritage, the largest long-term archive of software source code in the world, and how it helps facing these challenges.</p><p><strong>Short bio:</strong></p><p>Stefano Zacchiroli is full professor of computer science at Télécom Paris, Polytechnic Institute of Paris. His current research interests span digital commons, open source software engineering, computer security, and the software supply chain. He is co-founder and CTO of Software Heritage, the largest public archive of software source code. He is a Debian developer since 2001, where he served as Debian project leader from 2010 to 2013. He is a former board director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and recipient of the 2015 O’Reilly Open Source Award.</p>