Sharing source code and documentation allows other researchers to freely access, reuse, modify and redistribute your research software.
If you have created code or software to visualise or interrogate your research data then you can also preserve this in a data repository, alongside full documentation to help others verify your findings or reproduce your methodology. It can allow you to keep track of versions and track download and citation statistics.
According to the Software Sustainability Institute, open sourcing is key to sustainable software practice and ensures the software you use today will be available - and continue to be improved and supported - in the future.
Source Code Management
A source code manager (SCM) is a software tool used by teams of programmers to manage source code.
SCMs are used to track revisions in software. Each revision is given a timestamp and includes the name of the person who is responsible for the change. Various revisions may be compared, stored and merged with other revisions.
Free software movement
The idea of the Free Software Movement is that computer users deserve the freedom to form a community. You should have the freedom to help yourself, by changing the source code to do whatever you need to do. And the freedom to help your neighbour, redistributing copies of programs to other people. Also the freedom to help build your community, by publishing improved versions so that other people can use them. An example of this is the GNU Operating System.
In this video we see how software was seen as finite, a product to be sold rather than being shared openly and improved by any contributors.
This Library guide by RMIT University Library is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence, except where otherwise noted. All reasonable efforts have been made to clearly label material where the copyright is owned by a third party and ensure that the copyright owner has consented to this material being presented in this library guide. The RMIT University logo is ‘all rights reserved’.