cognitive science
and more
Open-source software for science

This is a guest post for the Open Science Collaboration Blog. You can read the full post here.

A little more than three years ago I started working on OpenSesame, a free program for the easy development of experiments, mostly oriented at psychologists and neuroscientists. The first version of OpenSesame was the result of a weekend-long hacking sprint. By now, OpenSesame has grown into a substantial project, with a small team of core developers, tens of occasional contributors, and about 2500 active users.

Because of my work on OpenSesame, I've become increasingly interested in open-source software in general. How is it used? Who makes it? Who is crazy enough to invest time in developing a program, only to give it away for free? Well ... quite a few people, because open source is everywhere. Browsers like Firefox and Chrome. Operating systems like Ubuntu and Android. Programming languages like Python and R. Media players like VLC. These are all examples of open-source programs that many people use on a daily basis.

But what about specialized scientific software? More specifically: Which programs do experimental psychologists and neuroscientists use? Although this varies from person to person, a number of expensive, closed-source programs come to mind first: E-Prime, SPSS, MATLAB, Presentation, Brainvoyager, etc. Le psychonomist moyen is not really into open source.

Continue reading on the Open Science Collaboration blog!