Open Source as Institutional Infrastructure

Research data workflows run on open source:

• Data collection, cleaning, analysis, visualization
• Reproducibility tooling: containers, workflows, version control
• Repositories and scholarly infrastructure

92% of researchers use software; 69% say their research would not be practical without it.

The people keeping it running are increasingly called Research Software Engineers (RSEs), a growing professional community with no standard institutional home.

If every organization had to replace open source with proprietary equivalents, the cost would exceed $8.8 trillion.

Data professionals built open data infrastructure: FAIR, DMPs, curation, provenance.

FAIR4RS is the same inflection point for software — and UC has been showing the way for 50 years.

BSD Unix · Ceph · Apache Spark · Jupyter · RISC-V · Ray

The pipeline from university research to global infrastructure is not rare or accidental.

An Open Source Program Office supports, governs, and promotes open source within an institution.

• Originated in industry: ~77% of large tech companies have one
• First academic OSPOs: Johns Hopkins, UC Santa Cruz, and RIT (2021)
• 34 academic OSPOs in CURIOSS worldwide and growing
• Core functions: policy, licensing guidance, best practices, education, community

world_topo = fetch("https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/world-atlas@2/countries-110m.json").then(r => r.json())
members = FileAttachment("curioss-members.csv").csv({typed: true})

Plot.plot({
  projection: {
    type: "equal-earth",
    domain: {
      type: "MultiPoint",
      coordinates: members.map(d => [+d.lon, +d.lat])
    },
    inset: 40
  },
  width: 660,
  height: 340,
  style: {background: "transparent"},
  marks: [
    Plot.graticule({stroke: "#e8eef8", strokeWidth: 0.5}),
    Plot.geo(topojson.feature(world_topo, world_topo.objects.land), {
      fill: "#e8eef8", stroke: "#ccc", strokeWidth: 0.5
    }),
    Plot.dot(members, {
      x: d => +d.lon,
      y: d => +d.lat,
      r: 7,
      fill: d => d.uc_network === "yes" ? "#ff9100" : "#003cb3",
      stroke: "white",
      strokeWidth: 1.2,
      tip: true,
      title: d => d.name
    })
  ]
})

🟠 UC OSPO Network  ·  🔵 CURIOSS member

A multi-campus collaboration treating open source as shared infrastructure.

• 6 campuses: Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego
• Launched April 2024, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
• $1.85M in external funding to date
• Lead: UC Santa Cruz, the first OSPO in a large state university system
• Serves 280,000+ students and 25,000+ faculty

Acts as a neutral convener: no single campus, company, or grant cycle can pull the work away.

If you do technical data services, researchers are already bringing you these questions:

• “What license should I use for this code?”
• “Is this library still maintained? Should I depend on it?”
• “How do I make this reproducible and citable?”
• “My funder wants a software management plan.”
• “How do I accept contributions from collaborators?”

That is OSPO work. The frame makes it legible to your institution.

The network has already built the resources (Laura Langdon, UC OSPO):

UC OSPO Network: ucospo.net

• Education site: ucospo.net/education
• Mailing list, Slack, events calendar

Global network: curioss.org, 34 academic OSPOs worldwide and growing

Tim Dennis Data Science Center, UCLA Library orcid.org/0000-0001-6632-3812 tdennis@library.ucla.edu