First results on the Security Culture Survey

Kurzfassung

Together with the University of Alabama, we are replicating "An empirical study of security culture in open source software communities" (https://doi.org/10.1145/3341161.3343520) with a focus on research software engineers in Germany and the US. The original study collected quantitative evidence on how important different aspects of security culture is in the field of open source software development. While we acknowledge that open source software also plays an important role throughout the research community, we are also aware that there are important differences. E.g., while participating in an open source project is largely guided by volunteering and idealism, development of research software has more personal motivations. Also, in research there is a different framework when it comes to (grant) policies and legal frameworks. Hence, we thought it was time to re-do this well designed study with some own extensions in the scientific community. The survey will be open until end of 2023 (and maybe a little longer). In this talk, we want to present some preliminary results and maybe some early findings especially with the focus on the German part of the study.