Project Scope

The initial scope of the project is guidance on the use of open-source projects, as well as collaboration on and creation of open-source projects. The primary aim is to provide guidance and link out to more information. If gaps are found, they will be noted for later follow-up and potential follow-on working groups:

  • Using open source
    • Relevance of different licence types
    • Watchouts on governance models and assessing risk
    • Landscape of tools available for vulnerability detection, validation/qualification/risk and enforcing licence policies, with particular reference to R-specific tools
  • Building open source
    • A summary and recommendation of licence types, with particular focus on permissive vs copyleft licences and the ramifications on code built on top of your project
    • Relevance of licences present in dependencies, direct vs transitive dependencies, and the issues around compiling with dependencies that could occur in something like a public shiny app
    • Landscape of places to place open-source projects and build collaborative communities
    • Pros/benefits and cons/risks for companies to open source clinical reporting codebases
    • Governance models for open-source projects with reference to their use today across clinical reporting collaborations
    • Survey and summary of contract types present where intellectual property and copyright is shared between companies
    • Tools available to understand the general health of projects (e.g. LFX tools), with specific reference to R extensions (e.g. metacran, riskmetric, openpharma)
    • Examples of release models, particularly where projects have inter-project dependencies (e.g. tidyverse de-coupled release model vs bioconductor cohort release model)
    • Tools for releasing and maintaining projects, with particular reference to tools for R packages
Project LeadsEmail 
Mike Stackhouse, Atorus Researchmike.stackhouse@atorusresearch.com
James Black, RocheJames.black.jb2@roche.com
Nicola Newton, PHUSE Project Assistant

nicky@phuse.global

CURRENT STATUS Q3 2023

Project to close after their talk at the EU Connect. 
Objectives & DeliverablesTimelines 
Create a living guidance document (using a tool like MkDocs or GitBook) that provides a reference document for open-source collaboration for pharma companies Q1 – Q2 2022
Release white paper as static snapshot of v1.0 of the guidanceQ2 2023


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