Standardizing open science: Passion meets practice
The open science movement has a dirty secret: a massive amount of the work being produced is practically unusable. Well-meaning researchers pour years into open code, only to ignore proven technical standards and run straight into brick walls. The fallout isn’t just unmaintainable software; it’s widespread frustration.
As a research software engineer at Paris-Saclay University, Chiara Marmo has managed several large-scale distributed projects.
With years of data processing software experience, Marmo has seen firsthand what happens when projects rely on heroics instead of structure: key contributors leave, code rots, and data vanishes. It’s a recurring design flaw born from a simple disconnect—plenty of passion for open science, but surprisingly little room for professional research software engineering.
Proprietary languages and inaccessible virtual machines can clearly hamper reproducibility. Marmo learned the hard way. After years of struggling to decipher undocumented, proprietary code, her first postdoc exposed her to the open-source alternative. Yet the honeymoon was short-lived. However, she quickly learned that ‘open’ does not guarantee quality: a lack of engineering standards can still undermine even the most impressive results.
The hard road to technical standards
Technical quality is often overlooked. For Marmo, basic engineering standards aren’t optional for open software; they’re the bare minimum. Getting the scientific community to actually adopt professional coding habits, though, is an uphill battle. Marmo recognizes that end-users struggle with recommended practices that vary significantly across academic disciplines. It’s hard to build momentum when even basic topics like software packaging raise endless questions. Add in a fast-moving landscape of constantly changing tools, and developer burnout becomes almost inevitable.
For Marmo, the solution to reduce the gap doesn’t consist of adding a new technical layer, but rather of providing consistent guidance. Institutional support plays a crucial role. To contribute to this effort, Marmo serves on the Source Code and Software College of the French Committee for Open Science.
In her role as a Software Heritage Ambassador, Marmo focuses on two main goals: pushing research teams to adopt real engineering habits—like modular code and clear documentation—and getting them to use established platforms like Software Heritage. Her goal is to integrate systemic archiving into the research lifecycle to ensure that no piece of scientific software is lost to time or institutional turnover.
Marmo is also deeply interested in improving software descriptions through the use of the CodeMeta standard, which is supported by SWH and adopted by a growing number of infrastructures, as this is the key to automating the description of software in academic workflows. The ability to map an archive’s content to a standardized metadata format allows for better integration with DOI platforms and improves the ‘findability’ of research software and the acknowledgment of the effort put into its development.
The art of community
Marmo strongly believes that by shifting from ‘isolated’ coding to a community-driven, professionalized approach to software development, we can significantly increase the impact and longevity of academic research. For 2 years, Marmo had been the SciKitLearn Consortium Community and Operations Manager. She was particularly involved in partnerships with industry players. During her time in the United States, she collaborated closely with the pyOpenSci ecosystem as an editor. Editors manage the review process end-to-end and help shape pyOpenSci’s standards. Today, she’s active in the Jupyter community and the Compute! movement—a grassroots initiative championing open-source tools for data science and engineering. Designed to build a transparent, user-controlled computing ecosystem, Compute! will host its first event in November 2026, bringing together maintainers, researchers, and enterprise engineers across both academia and industry.
Citing the code directly rather than the paper about it makes a tangible difference in academic circles, where software contributions remain poorly tracked and undervalued. Some US universities now track academic GitHub commits to measure developer impact, but that barely scratches the surface. Fully capturing software’s reach will require real bibliometric research, not quick workarounds. Sometimes, community participants themselves prefer to maintain distance from institutions to avoid interference. Ultimately, the disconnect stems from a lack of clear policy. Without defined rules around software contributions, academia and the open-source community will keep talking past each other.
Paving the way for a more open science
Instead of asserting that open science holds intrinsic value, Marmo is convinced that academia requires success stories proving that openness drives greater success. As an AstropPy contributor with significant experience in planetary and space data mining within the Geosciences Paris-Saclay Laboratory, she often mentions the approach taken by the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) team. HiRISE is “the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet, one of six instruments onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.” Deciding to go open from day one went against the norm in a fiercely competitive space. The decision gave HiRISE unprecedented visibility and made it a dominant force early on. Even the general public knew about the pictures produced by the HiRISE camera. Marmo also knows that the open science landscape is full of nuances, and the positive impact of openness will vary from one discipline to another.
To Marmo, source code is more than just a tool. It’s a core research topic that requires serious, dedicated attention.
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If you’d like to connect with Chiara Marmo, please reach out using this link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiara-marmo-marmochia
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