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.
