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Is your software project open or “fauxpen”? Are there barriers in place preventing external developers from contributing? Barriers to commercial uptake? Barriers to understanding how the software or the project itself works?<\/em><\/p>\n These are the kind of questions that the OSS Watch team, in partnership with\u00a0Pia Waugh<\/a>, developed the\u00a0Openness Rating<\/a>\u00a0to help you find out.<\/p>\n Using a series of questions covering legal issues, governance, standards, knowledge sharing and market access, the tool helps\u00a0you to identify potential problem areas for users, contributors and partners.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve used the Openness Rating at OSS Watch for several years as a key part of our consultancy work, but\u00a0this is the first time we\u2019ve made the app itself open for anyone to use.<\/p>\n It requires a fair bit of knowledge to get the most out of it, but even at a basic level its useful for highlighting questions that a project needs to be able to answer. If you have a software project developed within your research group, then you can use the app to get an idea of where the barriers might be. Likewise, you can use it if you’re considering contributing to a software project, for example when evaluating a platform to use as the basis of work in a research project.<\/p>\n Some of the questions do require a bit more specialist knowledge, but you can contact our team via\u00a0email\u00a0at\u00a0researchsupport@it.ox.ac.uk<\/a>\u00a0to get help.<\/p>\n Get started with the Openness Rating tool<\/a>.<\/p>\n Photo by\u00a0Alan Levine<\/a>\u00a0used under\u00a0CC-BY-SA<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Is your software project open or “fauxpen”? Are there barriers in place preventing external developers from contributing? Barriers to commercial uptake? Barriers to understanding how the software or the project itself works? These are the kind of questions that … Continue reading