This is a past event.

Alice Allen, faculty specialist in the Astronomy Department at the University of Maryland (College Park) and editor-in-chief of the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL), will be presenting at this week's physics colloquium. The title of her talk is "Schrödinger’s code: Opening the computational box". Please join the presentation on Thursday, March 18th at 4:00pm via Zoom. 

Abstract: Though computational methods are widely used in many disciplines, many researchers do not share the source code they develop, making it difficult to replicate and reuse the work. This presentation will cover the changing landscape that includes funders’ requirements, policy changes for existing journals, community resources, and more, that make it easy to release and archive codes to ensure they are available to support the research they enabled, improve the reproducibility of science, increase confidence in research, and meet new requirements made by funders and journals in many disciplines. It will also cover how the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL), which has been working since 1999 to improve the transparency of research by registering open codes used in research, has made it possible for software to be cited as a first-order research object, and how researchers can garner credit for their codes by having them cited correctly and improve papers by including citations for the computational methods that enabled the research.

Bio:  Alice Allen is a Faculty Specialist in the Astronomy Department at the University of Maryland, College Park and has been the Editor in Chief of the Astrophysics Source Code Library since 2010. She participates in cross-disciplinary efforts to improve research software release, citation, and recognition for those who write it. She is often asked to serve on expert panels and has presented at numerous universities, observatories, and institutes on academic software. Alice was profiled by Nature for her work on the ASCL, and writes often about the reproducibility challenges that face research.