SOURCE//PUBLIC · Volume 1 · Editorial field guide

The public code dividend

Public investment should leave a discoverable computational legacy.

Research University editorial desk · October 29, 2026. Prepared with ChatGPT; Chief Editor: Dr. Freedom Cheteni. Editorial resource; independent human peer review is not recorded. No new funding, experimental results or DOI are claimed.

The missing connection

A grant record, a paper and a repository can describe the same research while remaining disconnected. This journal begins with that discovery problem: connect funding to a project, the project to its software, and the software to a particular release. A catalog entry is a lead, not evidence that code can be installed or legally reused.

An atlas with boundaries

The founding atlas combines agency catalogs, funding databases, scientific registries, code hosts and preservation services. It does not claim to enumerate all federally funded software. Its unit is a discovery source; future software records require project-specific funding evidence.

The public code dividend

The editorial thesis is that discoverability, reproducibility and long-term stewardship help public investment become reusable infrastructure. That is a research agenda to evaluate, not an empirical finding established by this launch.

Primary discovery sources

These links support discovery and the described institutional scope. They do not establish funding or reproducibility for individual software packages.

Explore the complete founding atlas →