Open source software: an introduction

Open source software is available freely for use and improvement. For students, open source software means office software that is available free of charge, saving hundreds of dollars. For health professionals, it provides a better way to search PubMed. And for researchers, the open source methodology brings the same rigor to medical software that peer review did to other medical technologies. This rigor is why the NIH Roadmap provides funding for the development of open source software.

For these and other reasons you need to learn about open source software. This lecture will introduce you to the principles and show how you can take advantage of existing tools to support your work today free of charge.

It is aimed at students, healthcare professionals, faculty, researchers and librarians.