Explaining papers [#2]

It’s already been quite a while - but we published an opinion paper on the state of open-source software in neuroscience (Westner, McCloy, Larson, et al. 2025). Let me give you a short summary of our stance!

Many researchers in human electrophysiology in neuroscience rely on open-source software to analyze their data. This software is mostly written and maintained by fellow researchers (as you can see on my about page, I am part of the team of one of these open-source software packages, MNE-Python).

In the paper, we argue that the ecosystem of open-source software in human neuro-electrophysiology is not healthy. While software packages might have many contributors, i.e., researchers providing new code or solving problems with the software here and there (so-called “bugs”), a healthy software needs more than contributors, namely, maintainers. Maintainers are people who know the software in-and-out, and crucially not only a part of the software but all of it. This high-level overview as well as in-depth knowledge is necessary to keep a software afloat: Knowing where which code lives, how different modules work together, or how to release a new version of the software.

In the paper, we show that the biggest software projects for EEG and MEG research only have between one and three people in their project who have sufficient knowledge to keep the software from failing.

This means, that researchers in this subfield of neuroscience rely on the work of one to three people to be able to keep analyzing their data! Now you might ask: why is this? We identify the academic incentive system as a main problem: software work is not as visible and valued as writing papers. Furthermore, the formal role of research software engineers is still less common in neuroscience.

We cover what might need to change - citation habits, the funding landscape - and how this would also make the academic open-source world a more inclusive and thus diverse spot. Our core statement and plea: Software contributions are an important contribution to science, dear academia, please start treating them as such!

If you would like to read the full text, you can find it here:
Westner*, McCloy*, Larson*, Gramfort, Katz, Smith, Delorme, Litvak, Makeig, Oostenveld, Schoffelen, & Tierney (2025). Cycling on the Freeway: The Perilous State of Open Source Neuroscience Software. Imaging Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1162/imag_a_00554.
*Lead authors