UT-OSPO Participation Pathway
Level 1: Using
Researchers use appropriate open source software tools.
Level 2: Contributing
Research teams have a deeper understanding of an external software community, participate in identifying bugs, and asking for new features.
Level 3: Sharing
Software from a team is made available using an open source license and on an open platform facilitating collaboration (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc).
Level 4: Accepting
An open source project receives contributions from outside the founding researchers.
Level 5: Advancing Ecosystems (upstream/downstream)
- An open source project is part of a larger ecosystem of related projects with up and downstream dependencies.
- Project members contribute and mentor in upstream and downstream projects.
Participation Pathway Poster
Download a visual representation of the pathway levels.
UT resources
Grant facilities language for UT-OSPO
The University of Texas Open Source Program Office (UT-OSPO) is a center for open source activity, connection, and training across the University of Texas at Austin. The UT-OSPO helps grow the UT open source communities and provide long-term open source software connections for researchers through a diverse program of training, high-level consultations, and best practice documentation. The UT-OSPO is jointly coordinated by UT Austin’s central IT services, the UT Libraries, the iSchool, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).
More specifically, this University-wide support institute offers a variety of training courses open to students, faculty, and researchers from introductory material on the why’s and how’s behind open source to more advanced courses on using containerization to each distributed, open source software development. We offer support through the existing help desks at the UT Libraries, UT Central IT, and TACC, in addition to Best Practice Documents on our website, https://opensource.utexas.edu/. In addition, we can work directly with departments and development teams to help guide you to resources or support in-house activities, such as hackathons. For more information, please visit the website.
Discovery to Impact
Are you a UT researcher, staff member, or student with an idea or technology you think has potential? You’ve come to the right place. Discovery to Impact can help.
Discovery to Impact is the connection between campus innovators and industry. We cultivate ideas, uncover pathways to market, and foster commercial collaborations that translate academic research into services, treatments, and products that benefit society.
UT Libraries Resources and Services
Texas Data Repository
DMPTool
The DMPTool (Data Management Plan Tool) is a great resource for researchers who need to craft a data management and sharing plan at the outset of a research project. It is available to faculty, staff, and student researchers at UT Austin and facilitates the process of creating plans that comply with research funding agency DMP requirements for grant applications, including those which require sharing of research software as open source code. The UT Libraries is the point of contact for this platform and can provide assistance with data management plan preparation.
Open Source community websites
US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI)
URSSI's mission is to improve the recognition , development, and use , of software for a more sustainable research enterprise.
FOSS Foundation Directory
Free and open-source software (FOSS)
Welcome to the FOSS Foundations Metadata directory! We are eager to collaborate with academic researchers and open source practitioners alike on curating rich metadata about the many excellent non-profit Foundations that either host or help open source projects succeed.
