Daniel S. Katz, iSchool affiliated faculty member and assistant director for scientific software and applications at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), is coleading a group that is working to encourage broad adoption of a consistent policy for software citation across disciplines. By using a consolidated set of citation principles, FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group hopes to improve knowledge creation and sharing through the use of technology.
On May 10-11 Katz will discuss this software citation research at the 2nd Conference on Non-Textual Information in Hannover, Germany. In his talk, "Software citation: a cornerstone of software-enabled research," he will present the Software Citation Principles that the previous FORCE11 group (Software Citation Working Group) published in September 2016 in PeerJ Computer Science.
"We will soon move into a new phase of working with publishers, archivists, university administrators, funders, and other stakeholders to implement the principles. While I think the principles are a good step forward, I am also aware of their weaknesses, some of which are identified in the paper, and some of which have arisen from later discussion," said Katz.
Katz will teach a course on software citation at the FORCE11 Scholarly Communications Institute, a week-long summer training course to be held July 31-August 3 at the University of California, San Diego.
In addition to software citation, his research interests include computational workflows, software sustainability, and computational resilience.
"A good fraction of my interest in software is more aligned with information science than with computer science," Katz said of his affiliation with the iSchool.
Katz is a founding topic editor of the Journal of Open Source Software and formerly led the Software Cluster in the Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure as a National Science Foundation program officer. He received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Northwestern University.