Growing Our Support for Scientific Open Source
Open source software is the foundation of modern biomedicine. It accelerates scientific discovery by being free and accessible to the public, allowing anyone to use, adapt, and build on existing work. As part of our Open Science vision at CZI, we’re committed to supporting the creators and maintainers of critical tools used by researchers globally. That’s why we’re excited to open the fifth funding cycle of our Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) program to support software maintenance, growth, development, and community engagement for some of the most widely used software tools in biomedicine.
The EOSS program supports domain-specific and foundational software tools from a broad range of scientific disciplines. This fifth cycle will continue with this approach while also encouraging applications from areas of particular focus relevant to CZI Science that will accelerate our efforts to develop new research, institutes and technologies to measure and observe human biology in new ways to benefit human health. These three areas of biomedicine — infectious disease, imaging, and single-cell biology — are strongly reliant on computational tools. The EOSS program will allow developers and maintainers to further build and stabilize open source tools to benefit scientists across these fields and more.
Since the launch of the EOSS program in 2019, we have supported more than 100 critical open source software projects for biomedical research for a total of $22.9 million dollars. Learn more about all our open source software grantees.
We’re excited to support the evolution of the open source ecosystem and nurture its growth — whether that’s through our fifth cycle of EOSS, or by encouraging other science funders to support these vital tools. Support for open source software continues to grow. Both governmental and philanthropic funders made sizable investments in recent years, such as the Moore Foundation’s support for the next decade of scientific Python; the Sloan Foundation-sponsored Open Source Programs Offices and FOSS Contributor Funds; the Virtual Institute for Scientific Software funded by Schmidt Futures; grants in support of open source tools and libraries software by NASA’s open science initiative; and awards by the French Government to support open source research software.
Coordinating funder support for open source scientific software is critical for ensuring the ecosystem grows sustainably. CZI recently joined the Research Software Alliance (ReSA) Funders Forum, a collaboration of funding organizations committed to supporting research software and its maintainers as fundamental and vital to research. Through the ReSA Funders Forum and other initiatives, CZI hopes to inspire other funders to prioritize supporting open source software.
Learn more and apply to the EOSS RFA by April 19, and share this opportunity widely. For administrative and programmatic inquiries, technical assistance, or other questions, please contact sciencegrants@chanzuckerberg.com.
Learn more about our work in open science.
Carly Strasser, Science Program Manager, Open Science
Carly is an open science advocate and former biology researcher, working at the interface of researchers and those who support them. As Program Manager for Open Science at CZI, she works to support organizations and people that enable open, reproducible, and accessible research. Prior to joining CZI, Carly worked to support researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the California Digital Library.
Dario Taraborelli, Science Program Officer, Open Science
Dario is a social computing researcher and an open knowledge advocate. As the Science Program Officer for Open Science at CZI, his goal is to build programs and technology to support open, reproducible, and accessible research. Prior to joining CZI, he served as the Director, Head of Research at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia and its sister projects.
