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Register a new userAstro2020 APC White Paper: Elevating the Role of Software as a Product of the Research Enterprise
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Software is a critical part of modern research, and yet there are insufficient mechanisms in the scholarly ecosystem to acknowledge, cite, and measure the impact of research software. The majority of academic fields rely on a one-dimensional credit model whereby academic articles (and their associated citations) are the dominant factor in the success of a researchers career. In the petabyte era of astronomical science, citing software and measuring its impact enables academia to retain and reward researchers that make significant software contributions. These highly skilled researchers must be retained to maximize the scientific return from petabyte-scale datasets. Evolving beyond the one-dimensional credit model requires overcoming several key challenges, including the current scholarly ecosystem and scientific culture issues. This white paper will present these challenges and suggest practical solutions for elevating the role of software as a product of the research enterprise.
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The US professional astronomy and astrophysics fields are not representative of the diversity of people in the nation. For example, 2017 AIP reports show that in 2014, women made up only about 20 percent of the faculty in astronomy and physics departments, and the numbers for under-represented minorities (men and women) were, and remain, low. However numerous studies have demonstrated that diverse groups (in both cognition and identity) outperform groups that are more homogeneous, even when the homogeneous group is comprised of all high achieving experts. (Hong and Page, 2004, Kleinberg and Raghu, 2018). This has been shown to be the case on a variety of complex tasks. Thus, if we want the best opportunity to make progress on and answer the research questions of the 2020s, we must employ diverse teams who bring different heuristics and perspectives to those problems. However, currently in the field there are few tangible motivations to encourage projects, missions or programs to employ teams that are diverse in both cognitive areas and identity to take on these complex problems. Managing groups and organizations contracted to run these efforts are currently not required or incentivized to employ an identity diverse workforce. In this position (white) paper, we recommend that agency funding (from NSF, NASA, DOE, etc.), especially for missions, projects and programs, encourage the development and retention of diverse teams by requiring documentation of and progress on metrics related to diversity, inclusion and equity. We further recommend that documented progress on diversity and inclusion metrics should be monitored in reviews alongside project management and budget reporting. Managing groups and organizations proposing to administer projects on behalf of agencies should be required to demonstrate competency with respect to diversity and inclusion metrics.
The commercial SmallSat industry is booming and has developed numerous low-cost, capable satellite buses. SmallSats can be used as vehicles for technology development or to host science missions. Missions hosted on SmallSats can answer specific science questions that are difficult or impossible to answer with larger facilities, can be developed relatively quickly, serve to train engineering and scientists, and provide access to space for small institutions. SmallSats complement larger Astrophysics missions and allow the broader community to test new ideas at the bottom of the market, creating new capabilities which find their way to larger missions. Currently, NASA Astrophysics does not provide flight opportunities that would allow technology maturation of instrument systems or concepts of operations. Without flight opportunities to mature technologies, missions hosted on SmallSats are likely to be considered high risk, and face long odds being selected for implementation. Our primary suggestion is that NASA decouples science and technology for SmallSats by creating a technology-based SmallSat AO, modeled after the Earth Sciences InVEST call. Such AO would help reduce the new technology risk for science missions of any size. We also suggest that NASA provides additional science-driven SmallSat opportunities at the ~$12M funding level, provides access to new launchers free of charge to proposers, and re-structures the solicitation AOs so that SmallSats do not compete with other mission classes such as balloons.
The past two decades have seen a tremendous investment in observational facilities that promise to reveal new and unprecedented discoveries about the universe. In comparison, the investment in theoretical work is completely dwarfed, even though theory plays a crucial role in the interpretation of these observations, predicting new types of phenomena, and informing observing strategies. In this white paper, we argue that in order to reach the promised critical breakthroughs in astrophysics over the next decade and well beyond, the national agencies must take a serious approach to investment in theoretical astrophysics research. We discuss the role of theory in shaping our understanding of the universe, and then we provide a multi-level strategy, from the grassroots to the national, to address the current underinvestment in theory relative to observational work.
Commodity cloud computing, as provided by commercial vendors such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, has revolutionized computing in many sectors. With the advent of a new class of big data, public access astronomical facility such as LSST, DKIST, and WFIRST, there exists a real opportunity to combine these missions with cloud computing platforms and fundamentally change the way astronomical data is collected, processed, archived, and curated. Making these changes in a cross-mission, coordinated way can provide unprecedented economies of scale in personnel, data collection and management, archiving, algorithm and software development and, most importantly, science.
Organizations that support science (astronomy) such as federal agencies, research centers, observatories, academic institutions, societies, etc. employ advisory committees and boards as a mechanism for reviewing their activities and giving advice on practices, policies and future directions. As with any scientific endeavor, there is concern over complementing these committees with enough members who have as broad a range of expertise and understanding as possible, so that bias is mitigated. However, for a number of reasons (logistical, practical, financial, etc.), committees can also not be infinitely large and thus trade-offs must be made. It is often recognized that conflicts of interest must be acknowledged within these committees, but what is not often recognized it the potential for unmitigated biases and group think that can be introduced as part of these committees. In this white paper, we recommend that advisory committees that collect community input, (e.g., the Decadal Survey review committee), also collect, compile and review input demographic data before finalizing reports, (e.g., the final 2020 Decadal Survey Report). A summary of these data should be released alongside the final survey report. This information would enable the committee to understand potential blind spots and biases of the data collection phase and inform future data collections of any barriers that affect the omission of perspectives from various demographics.
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