Citation: Andreas Prlić, James B. Procter (2012/12/06) Ten Simple Rules for the Open Development of Scientific Software. PLOS Computational Biology (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002802
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002802
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002802
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Ten Simple Rules for the Open Development of Scientific Software
Download: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002802
Tagged: Computer Science (RSS) academic software (RSS)

Summary

Many important bioinformatics projects are open-source.
Publishing source can increase impact and reproducibility (Vandewalle 2012).
Grants run out, so software goes unmaintained (rots) and might disappear. Consider using permanent storage.

The rules

Rule 1: Don't reinvent the wheel
Rule 2: Code well
- Software Carpentry
Rule 3: Be your own user
Rule 4: Be transparent
- Fear of being scooped is unfounded; In the authors' anecdotal experience, find it likely to gain collaborations.
- It leads to more scrutinized and correct code.
Rule 5: Be simple
Rule 6: Don't be perfectionist
- "Release early, release often" --Eric S. Raymond
Rule 7: Nurture and grow your community
- Give credit
- Develop stable APIs (and semantic versioning when you have to change them).
- Make it easy to contribute (PRs).
Rule 8: Promote your project
Rule 9: Find sponsors
- Academic grants, Google summer of code
Rule 10: Science counts