UC Davis Receives Grant to Build Network Supporting Open Source Software in Collaboration with Five Other UCs

A $1.85 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation will build a first-of-its-kind, systemwide Open Source Program Office (OSPO) across the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego and Santa Cruz to promote open source software for research, teaching and public service.

Research, and much of the tech industry, runs on open source software. Open source software — such as R and Python libraries, Omeka, LibreOffice, and more — is built and used by a wide range of groups, from research core facilities to individual researchers, and domains from bioinformatics to the digital humanities. But open source tools cannot persist if they are not built or maintained properly.

“We believe that open source practices can produce more sustainable and trustworthy software and are vital to a healthy and inclusive research and learning environment,” said Josh Greenberg, a Program Director at the Sloan Foundation. “We’re proud to be supporting this ambitious initiative, which will make the University of California the first to build out open source capacity at a system level.”

The new grant will institutionalize support for open source software development and use across the UC system by creating a UC OSPO network that will lead coordinated activities and build cross-campus communities. It will support researchers who create shareable software as well as those who use open source software in their research and teaching.

The UC OSPO network aims to strengthen collaboration and knowledge-sharing among the campuses, demonstrate the value of a networked approach to supporting open source, and identify a resource and governance structure to allow the network to grow and thrive.

Specific goals include developing an open source repository browser to aid discovery of open source software projects across the UC, connect research teams, and promote open source sustainability and best practices. The network will also develop open source curriculum and resource repositories to host UC-developed training materials that can be integrated into courses, training, research experiences, and other areas of need for faculty, students, and staff. Hackathons, competitions, and other opportunities will be available for UC students to learn about and get involved in open source software development.

The UC Davis leads — Peter Brantley, the library’s director of Online Strategy, and Vladimir Filkov, professor of Computer Science and DataLab’s director for translational data science — are part of a UC-wide leadership group that also includes James Davis and Stephanie Lieggi at UC Santa Cruz (lead institution); Fernando Pérez and Stéfan van der Walt at UC Berkeley; Todd Grappone and Tim Dennis at UCLA; David Minor and Erik Mitchell at UC San Diego; and Amber Budden and Jonathan Balkind at UC Santa Barbara. Other collaborators at UC Davis include Vessela Ensberg, Pamela Reynolds, and Carl Stahmer.

Focus at UC Davis

Sustainability of open source projects, particularly those originating from the UC system, will be a particular focus of the OSPO’s efforts at UC Davis. This work will include developing best practices for building communities, increasing adoption, and prototyping a containerization service to enable easier open source software maintenance and reuse. This work builds upon and translates into practice the software sustainability work that Filkov’s DECAL lab has been pioneering over the past decade, as well as the growing expertise at the UC Davis Library and DataLab in working with open-source projects and supporting researchers across the university.

“UC Davis is well known for collaborative and translational research that creates lasting impact,” Filkov said. “We are happy to partner with five other UCs to create a first-of-its-kind concept of systemwide networked Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs). The UC Davis OSPO will serve to help researchers create sustainable open source software now and into the future, accelerating the impact of our research and educational initiatives.”

A unique system-level partnership

This award follows an initial grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which established an Open Source Program Office at UC Santa Cruz in 2022.

While there are now several OSPOs at individual universities throughout the country, UC’s model is unique in that it uses a networked approach to leverage the diverse range of expertise that exists throughout the system. The UC OSPO allows each campus to develop infrastructure that promotes individual areas of excellence and contribute to novel and potentially groundbreaking approaches to applying open source and open science in an academic setting. By leveraging knowledge across the entire network, the network approach facilitates resource sharing and the development of unified approaches to common challenges.

“The University of California leads the world in groundbreaking research and has been the source of innovations in a wide spectrum of disciplines, as well as a leader in developing open source technologies and ecosystems,” said Scott Brandt, UC Office of the President’s Associate Vice Provost for Research & Innovation. “The UC OSPO network…will comprehensively support the UC research enterprise across a wide range of disciplines and, as the first network of OSPOs within a large university system, serve as a model for others to follow.”