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Motivations and Barriers to Contributing to Open Source Research Software

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Open source software relies on the community of volunteer developers that contribute to and maintain the project. For research software, these developers are often the researchers who actively use the software for scientific work. What motivates researchers to contribute to the research software that they use? What are the barriers that researchers face when contributing to research software? As project maintainers for jsPsych, a widely-used open source library for building behavioral experiments, we wanted to understand how researchers who used our software thought about contributing to it. jsPsych features a hyper-modular design that allows users to add new functionality as plugins, without needing to contribute to a central repository. An innovation in one lab can be easily published and shared with other labs, and yet we've found that despite a quickly growing userbase, the number of contributors is growing at a much slower pace. To try and get an understanding of why this is the case, we conducted qualitative interviews to uncover users’ relationships to open source contribution. We discerned common themes in contributors’ motivations, as well as barriers articulated by those who had made modifications without contributing them. We conducted 63 interviews with active users of the software. Participants were selected from cited uses of jsPsych and ranged from university faculty to PhD candidates and even postgraduate research assistants. Only some individuals demonstrated training as software engineers, while the majority consisted of novice programmers who had hacked research solutions with the framework. Though this exploratory sample could not capture the breadth of user innovations, it became an effective base from which to launch sustained engagement of users-turned-developers. We arrived at the following conclusions by the end of our interview process. First, we found that while over half of users interviewed had made modifications, less than a quarter had ever contributed to the repository ecosystem. Next, we found that a majority of non-contributing modders had not contributed due to technical insecurities or lack of familiarity with code contribution standards. Additionally, we found that a little under a third were unfamiliar with contribution repositories, while another equal proportion of interviewees asserted their code was out of date and incompatible with current versions of the framework. Third, we found that of the few contributors interviewed, the vast majority contributed entirely in good faith and out of gratitude. Only half did so out of faith specifically in open-source principles, while only one expressed peer recognition as an additional motivator. Based on these initial conclusions, we suggest that project leads in open source adopt more proactive approaches when calling fresh contributors into the fold. Documentation should be restructured to guide users towards contribution as a readily achievable goal. We likewise recommend that project maintainers open other accessible channels of communication with their communities, so that developers can showcase their contributions and demonstrate participation in open source development to their peers.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17288709
Institution: Vassar College
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7085659184
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