Sound Software Competition

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are very excited to announce the first competition for SoundSoftware.ac.uk prizes for reproducibility in audio and music research. Our goal is to promote the development and release of sustainable and reusable software and datasets alongside published research.

In a few of our recent papers and presentations we've seen that much audio and music research work is published without the accompanying software implementations. One reason is a lack of self-confidence - the fear that one's code is not good enough to share. (You can read more about this in our ICASSP 2012 paper, Towards Software Reuse in Audio and Music Research and in the Institute's post Haters Gonna Hate - why you shouldn't be ashamed of releasing your code). We believe that one way of countering this fear is to promote the idea that sharing is a worthwhile goal in itself.

With this initiative we aim to reward researchers who strive for reproducibility in their work and, most importantly, to raise awareness of the importance of publishing both the software and the data to allow other researchers to build on a researcher's publications. We see this as a chance to discuss the issues around trust in research, such as reproducible publication, open access, open source and licensing.

The prizes we're offering vary, but typically we're going to provide article processing charges to make a publication open access, or travel bursaries for researchers to attend conferences or workshops to present their work. Although the SoundSoftware project is UK-based, researchers from other countries can also take part - in which case SoundSoftware can help with travel costs to a UK workshop or conference, or a visit to a UK institution.

The deadline for submitting an entry is the 19 May 2013. Entries will be analysed by an external panel who will look at ease of reproducibility, quality of sustainability planning and potential to enable high quality research in the UK audio and music research community.

These prizes are a new initiative for us, but we hope to run them regularly. If you have published your research work so that others can reproduce your research outputs, or if you know fellow researchers from the audio and music community that do so, you can win a prize!

More information about the prizes can be found on the SoundSoftware website.