Over the past year I've had the opportunity to participate in the work of a National Academies Committee advising NASA Earth and Space Sciences on Open Source policies and strategies for their scientific work. The report from this work was released a few days ago and can be found at

Open Source Software Policy Options for NASA Earth and Space Sciences

Modern science is ever more driven by computations and simulations. In particular, the state of the art in space and Earth science often arises from complex simulations of climate, space weather, and astronomical phenomena. At the same time, scientific work requires data processing, presentation, and analysis through broadly available proprietary and community software.1 Implicitly or explicitly, software is central to science. Scientific discovery, understanding, validation, and interpretation ...

Participating in this work was a fascinating experience, and a really important counter-balance to the narratives that say open source is the answer, and all related questions are simple. I think that this is an excellent report that honestly represents the complexities that we will encounter as we move to open science.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI