Crediting Pull Requests to Open Source Research Software as an Academic Contribution

Abstract Like any other scientific discipline, the High Performance Computing community suffers under the publish or perish paradigm. As a result, a significant portion of novel algorithm designs and hardware-optimized implementations never make it into production code but are instead abandoned once they served the purpose of yielding (another) publication. At the same time, community software packages driving scientific research lack the addition of new technology and hardware-specific implementations. This results in a very unsatisfying situation where researchers and software developers are working independently, and the traditional peer reviewing is reaching its capacity limits. A paradigm shift that accepts high-quality software pull requests to open source research software as conference contributions may create incentives to realize new and/or improved algorithms in community software ecosystems. In this paper, we propose to complement code reviews on pull requests to scientific open source software with scientific reviews, and allow the presentation and publication of high quality software contributions that present an academic improvement to the state-of-the-art at scientific conferences.