Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Research Centre for Software, brings together expert software teams from universities across Ireland in a coordinated centre of research excellence with a strong industry focus. It is headquartered at the University of Limerick with academic partners in 12 Irish universities. The Lero Open Source and Open Science Programme Office (Lero-OSPO) is a dedicated platform that is set up with the goal of promoting engagement between Lero members, stakeholders, and the broader Open Source community and promoting Open Science activities within Lero. The primary functions of the OSPO include overseeing the development and management of open source software at Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software, with responsibilities including open source library selection, license compliance workflows, managing Lero members' relationship with the broader open source software (OSS) community, and more. Other than supporting Lero members' interaction with the OSS community, the OSPO also advocates and promotes Lero's Open Science policies and helps the Lero members with various activities & efforts related to Open Science.
The Lero-OSPO has provided a range of open source services for all the researchers in the 12 academic partners and beyond. It has been busy expanding its efforts to provide open access to its software developments. The OSPO manages interactions with the wider OSS community, and we are now collaborating with a number of US universities including Carnegie Mellon University, University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), Brandeis, Johns Hopkins and Rochester Institute of Technology.
Initiatives include tutorials on Open Source software licenses, Semesters of Code for undergraduate students, and training on open science best practices. On launching the Lero-OSPO we held a half-day workshop featuring international contributors that focused on (undergraduate) student engagement in the OSS space and OSS case studies within Lero. Since GitHub is one of the most popular developer platforms for building, scaling, and delivering open source software, Lero has set up a GitHub organization to bring all relevant activities under the same umbrella and encourage Lero members to share their software as open source where possible. The "SFI-Lero" organization has been moderately active, with 15 repositories and 33 members having signed up for the organization. One of the main functions of the office is governing license compliance, including determining which licenses can be used with which projects and overseeing how teams track their open source components and dependencies.
In 2022, our members partnered with Open Ireland Network to do Skillnet-funded research into open source and InnerSource skills in Ireland. In February 2023, Lero’s Open Science Committee was recognised with the Young European Research Universities (YERUN) Open Science Award. In March 2023, we once again partnered with Open Ireland Network and OSPO++ to host an event examining the role of open source in the university innovation ecosystem. We had approximately 80 attendees, including representatives from universities in the Czech Republic, Sweden, and the United States. In the summer of 2023, we were awarded a grant from the National Open Research Forum to follow up on one of the recommendations that came from the event: to establish a working group to explore international best practices for university OSS strategies and policies. Nine Irish institutions have already signed up to be part of that working group. This project will also focus on awareness, education and outreach. Overall this project will increase clarity and improve the use, creation, and management of OSS at Irish universities, improve inter-university OSS collaboration and create a lasting community of individuals, experienced in OSS in the Irish university context.
