Understanding Community Health of Published Research Software with Augur

Abstract: CHAOSS recommends comparing metrics for many projects you are familiar with to assess open source health and sustainability, but newcomers are frequently uncertain about which projects to compare their own projects to. This is an especially significant problem for research, academic, and non-government organizational (NGO) projects, as they typically have different patterns of engagement when compared to Linux Foundation and other corporatized open source projects. In this work, we illustrate how to bridge this gap by using Augur to analyze the community health of ~3200 software packages that have been peer-reviewed and published by the Journal of Open Source Software, which represent a class of research software: that which is intended to be shared community software and for which the developers seek scholarly credit.