Syracuse University is now home to a new hub supporting the development of open-source software and offering resources for faculty, students, staff and academic partners conducting and accessing open-source work.
The Open Source Project Office (OSPO) is supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation totaling more than $630,000, according to Duncan Brown, vice president for research. A collaboration between the Syracuse University Office of Research, Syracuse University Libraries and Information Technology Systems (ITS), OSPO will be operated by Syracuse University’s Center for Advanced Systems and Engineering (CASE).
Collin Capano ’05, G’11 has been named as the office director. He previously served as the high-performance computing facilitator at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and as a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics. Capano recently returned to Syracuse University to also serve as a research professor in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Collin Capano
“I am excited to be back in Syracuse and leading such an important initiative,” Capano says. “There is growing recognition in academia of the importance of open-source software and open-source research more generally. The OSPO will help nurture open-source work and make Syracuse University a leading institution on open-source education and research.”
OSPO is a multidisciplinary initiative that coordinates activities across schools and colleges and accelerates research and creative work by leveraging open-source software and best practices. The goal is to train the next generation of leaders in open-source software development and help faculty, staff and students transition existing software into sustainable, open-source material or adopt open-source solutions to pressing problems across disciplines.
Besides Libraries and ITS, additional support for the initiative is provided by the Office of Technology Transfer, the Office of Research Development and the College of Law’s Innovation Law Center. The grant also supports a new postdoctoral fellowship and single-semester research assistantships for students who are doing software-intensive research.
“While we have excelled at providing computing hardware for research, Syracuse University has lacked a hub to coordinate open-source development efforts across campus; the Open Source Project Office fills that missing critical need,” Brown says. “This builds on the University’s history of cross-campus collaboration, a public-spirited approach to innovation and technology, a vision of bringing emerging technologies to research labs and classrooms and ultimately offering knowledge to the world through public engagement around emerging technologies.”
OSPO will work with the Office of Academic Affairs to help shape how open-source practices impact career development and to strengthen the University’s open-source community relationships.
Brown, who has two decades of experience in open-source software development, is the principal investigator on the development project. Co-principal investigators are Dean of Libraries and University Librarian David Seaman and Interim Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer Eric Sedore.
The University’s open-access publishing policies, read-and-publish agreements and open publishing systems are coordinated by the Libraries, as is the development of the University’s Open Data archive. The Libraries will expand advising and support services for open-access publishing and data management as part of OSPO.
The ITS team includes two cyberinfrastructure engineers who support access to a variety of computing hardware and infrastructure for faculty and students. ITS also oversees the University’s multi-faceted digital transformation project.
Contact OSPO by emailing ospo@syr.edu.
