Frontiers | Open is Not Enough. Let's Take the Next Step: An Integrated, Community-Driven Computing Platform for Neuroscience | Frontiers in Neuroinformatics

Use the link to access the full text “opinion article” written by Yaroslav O. Halchenko and Michael Hanke. Yaroslav O. Halchencko is affiliated with the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences both of Dartmouth College. Michael Hanke is affiliated with the Department of Experimental Psychology, Otto-von-Guericke University and the Center for Behavioral Sciences, Magdeburg, Germany. Both authors have worked on the Debian Project. More information about Debian is available at . The article opens as follows: “The last 5 years have seen dramatic improvements in the collaborative research infrastructure. A need for open research tools has been identified (Ince et al., 2012), and one solution has been clearing houses, such as the INCF Software Center and the NITRC portal, which facilitate efforts of peer-to-peer software and data sharing that were previously limited to only well-funded formal consortia (see, Poline et al., 2012, for a recent summary of the status quo). However, collecting these resources into a centralized clearing-house addresses only one necessary aspect on the way to a sustainable software ecosystem for neuroscience – availability. Unfortunately it does not ensure ease of deployment, nor does it offer a sustainable model for long-term maintenance. At the same time, 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. 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. To the best of our knowledge, NeuroDebian3 is the most comprehensive attempt at improving the neuroscience software ecosystem. It applies proven principles and procedures from Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) development to the maintenance and deployment of neuroscience software. NeuroDebian’s strategy is to work with scientists and developers, helping them to directly integrate their software with the Debian4 operating system (OS). Using the Debian OS as a foundation for these efforts offers five unique advantages for end-users and developers alike...”