Software citation

Nearly all research today has a digital component, and typically, scholarly results are strongly dependent on software. For the research results to be fully understood, the software that is used must be uniquely identified. Research software is frequently developed by researchers themselves, often initially to solve a single problem, and then later generalized to solve additional problems. Ideally, the software is shared so that other researchers can also benefit and avoid the duplicate work required for development and maintenance. The researchers must expect and receive value for their contribution and sharing. Because publishing is a key element of our existing scholarly structures, the research that was done must be clearly explained in papers. This can be used to create incentives for researchers not only to share their software, but also to contribute to community software, in both cases through software citation. Contributors to software that is used in papers and is cited by those papers can become authors of the software as it is tracked by indexes, which also track how often the software is cited.

Preparing for HL-LHC: Increasing the LHCb software publication rate to CVMFS by an order of magnitude

In the HEP community, software plays a central role in the operation of experiments’ facilities and for reconstruction jobs, with CVMFS being the service enabling the distribution of software at scale. In view of High Luminosity LHC, CVMFS developers investigated how to improve the publication workflow to support the most demanding use cases. This paper reports about recent CVMFS developments and infrastructural updates that enable faster publication into existing repositories. A new CVMFS component, the CVMFS Gateway, allows for concurrent transactions and the use of multiple publishers, increasing the overall publication rate on a single repository. Also, the repository data has been migrated to Ceph-based S3 object storage, which brings a relevant performance enhancement over the previously-used Cinder volumes. We demonstrate how recent improvements allow for faster publication of software releases in CVMFS repositories by focusing on the LHCb nightly builds use case, which is currently by far the most demanding one for the CVMFS infrastructure at CERN. The publication of nightly builds is characterized by a high churn rate, needs regular garbage collection, and requires the ability to ingest a huge amount of software files over a limited period of time.

Human Resources Management Practices and Employees' Performance in Bahrain Airport Services Company

The objective of the research is to investigate, examine and analyze the impact of human resources management practices on the performance of the employees in the Bahrain Airport Services Company (BAS). The data was collected through a questionnaire that has been designed. The questionnaire was distributed to a random sample consisting of 346 employees representing the researched community. Software package SPSS 22, was used for data analysis. Analytical and descriptive methods were employed to answer the research questions and to test the research hypotheses. The results indicated that there is a statistically significant impact of human resources management practices on the performance of the employees in the Bahrain Airport Services Company (BAS). Finally, some recommendations have been suggested.