[Insight-users] Fwd: Open is not Enough

[Luis Ibanez]

*Open is not Enough*

*Towards an integrated, community-driven computing platform for neuroscience
*

Kitware Blog at http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/324

In a recent paper<http://www.frontiersin.org/Neuroinformatics/10.3389/fninf.2012.00022/full>published
in the Open Access Journal Frontier
in NeuroInformatics <http://www.frontiersin.org/Neuroinformatics>, Yaroslav
Halchenko <http://community.frontiersin.org/people/YaroslavHalchenko/2437>and
Michael
Hanke <http://community.frontiersin.org/people/MichaelHanke/874> raise
awareness about the need for moving one step forward towards building
common computing platforms for scientific research.

http://www.frontiersin.org/Neuroinformatics/10.3389/fninf.2012.00022/full

The authors state:

*"the development model of many neuroscience research software projects is
broken. Inefficient and opaque procedures combined with a scarce developer
workforce result in tools of insufficient quality and robustness that we
rely on to conduct our research. Moreover, as the scientists, students, and
research groups responsible for these tools move on to new tasks, their
software is often left in a state of limbo, with no continued support for
bug fixes or sufficiently coordinated maintenance. Over time, changes in
underlying computing environments break the tools completely, and they
commonly become abandoned – with costly consequences for the scientists
depending upon them."*

And propose a pragmatic solution:

*"To address this problem, we need to bring our tools further into the
open, and consolidate development efforts on an open and community-driven
platform – one that is capable of providing easy access, installation, and
maintenance for any research software. Such effort will not only help to
improve aspects of software engineering, but also meet many unfulfilled
requirements toward the goal of practical open science."*

The proposed platform is the Debian Blend, which builds upon the strengths
of the Debian <http://www.debian.org/> Linux distribution:
  [image: neurodebian logo] Neuro-Debian <http://neuro.debian.net/>

A specialized Linux distribution such as NeuroDebian is much more that just
a collection of software. The developers who package the distribution take
great care on verifying:

   - Copyright and Licensing
   - Standards of Software Quality and Security
   - Versioning
   - Proper Configuration
   - and most importantly: Compatibility and Interoperability.

Thanks to all that hard work, researchers who adopt Neuro-Debian benefit
from having a software platform with hundreds of useful applications, that
are all configured properly and can be used together.

This is yet another example illustrating that the whole is much more than
the sum of its parts. Having access to a fully-equipped platform that
provides compatible state-of-the-art applications is a powerful boost to
researchers, and it is a solid step towards implementing Open Science as a
practical reality.

Highly recommend this
paper<http://www.frontiersin.org/Neuroinformatics/10.3389/fninf.2012.00022/full#>for
any supporters of Open Science.
http://www.frontiersin.org/Neuroinformatics/10.3389/fninf.2012.00022/full


    Luis
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