Reports

Nearly every research breakthrough at a university depends on countless lines of code. However, academic institutions often do not provide the necessary support, resources, incentives, or recognition for the scientists and engineers who develop and maintain that code. Campuses across the U.S. are institutionalizing support for open-source software — and for the researchers who work tirelessly to develop and maintain it.

Thanks to funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, several US universities have now founded Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) across the past half decade.[1] In the past two years, these efforts have expanded. In spring 2024, the University of California (UC) system launched the UC Open Source Program Office (OSPO) network, building on the work of the OSPO at the Santa Cruz campus.[2] In summer 2025, the University of Texas (UT) system was also awarded a grant by the Sloan Foundation to scope a model for a system-wide OSPO, following the one established at UT Austin.[3] By operating at the system level, the UC and UT OSPOs aim to further embody principles of openness and more widely and effectively enable open source work, by making resources and expertise more scalable as well as establishing a framework to facilitate community-building and cross-institution collaboration. Read more of this case study prepared by Claire Baytas, Dylan Ruediger at Ithaka S+R.

What a Season!

In the past six months, the UT-OSPO hosted and participated in 17 events and engagements, reaching nearly 1,000 participants. Thank you for engaging with us - we love seeing you and supporting research software development across campus.

What We’ve Been Up To

Thank you for sharing so many opportunities to learn, connect, and engage with open source research and technology across the community. We hosted three compelling Case Study Seminar Series that showcased the real-world impact of open source development. Speakers explored Pauliceia 2.0, an open source, participatory historical mapping platform; Tapis, a cyberinfrastructure project sustaining collaborative science at scale; and NetSage, which offered an in-depth look at the challenges and successes of building and maintaining open source software. If you’d like to see what you missed, these are all recorded and available on our website and YouTube channel.

Our training offerings spanned technical skill-building, research development, and policy awareness. Participants joined two two-day immersive Python workshops, explored federal policy changes impacting research sharing, and connected with collaborators at a Research Proposal Development Fair. Additional sessions included Introduction to Text as Data Using Python, SQL and Open Source Relational Databases, and AI for Generating Research Code. We also partnered with the Perry-Castañeda Library to host a GeoSciences Hackathon, bringing hands-on experimentation and interdisciplinary problem-solving to the forefront with researchers and students.

We were also excited to launch two new event series and debut a new community engagement effort. “Getting Up and Going with Open Source Software” focused on lowering barriers for those new to open source tools, while “Open to Work: Careers in Software Development” highlighted career pathways and workforce readiness. In addition, we participated in “Quant Night”, connecting students with training opportunities, jobs, and hands-on experiences in quantitative fields. If you’re interested in more events like these, please let us know.

We’ve also launched our Catalog of Active Software Projects. These projects come from researchers and disciplines across campus and provide exemplars of open source software developed as part of research. Submit your project for consideration!!

Coming Up

If you’re looking for training this spring, check out the Python series put on by Bioinformatics starting March 4. This three part series of Introductory Python, Intermediate Python, and Python for AI/ML is open to all fields. Check out our Containers series, which will take place on March 30 from 1:00-4:00 p.m. Central Time. And be on the lookout for continued talks with our Case Study Seminars and Open to Work events in April.

We also invite you and your students to participate in our Research Matching Service. We have partnered with the Office of Career and Life Design to match students with open source software research projects to provide real-world development experience to students across the University. If you have interested students, have them submit their resume. If you have a project that can provide student financial support and mentoring, please submit that project or reach out to us at ospo@utlists.utexas.edu.

Stay Connected

Consultations are in full swing. If you or your research team would like a one-on-one consultation for an open source software project, reach us at ospo@utlists.utexas.edu.

The OSPO Team