This is a periodic newsletter of the interesting things we’ve seen and what we are thinking about in open source policy analysis.

UBI Center researchers use Tax-Calculator to estimate effects of changing unemployment benefits. UBI Center researchers have released a new paper using Tax-Calculator to compare the effects of extended unemployment relief, universal payments to all or some individuals, and payroll tax cuts. Link

New open-source unemployment benefits calculator and Becker Friedman Institute working paper. Scholars with the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago have released an open-source unemployment benefits calculator alongside their paper examining unemployment insurance during COVID-19. Ernie Tedeschi from Evercore ISI used this code to determine the distribution of individuals affected by the proposed legislation for unemployment relief. Code, Tedeschi’s Analysis

New York–based nursing service releases open-source contact-tracing app. The Visiting Nurse Service of New York has created and released an open-source contact-tracing app designed for staff visits to patient homes. The organization created the app to fight the spread of COVID-19 among disabled and elderly individuals, one of the groups most vulnerable to the virus. Link, GitHub

Ireland contributes contact-tracing app to the Linux Foundation. Ireland’s public health organization, the Health Service Executive, has donated its open-source contract-tracing app to Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH). LFPH will begin modifying both Ireland’s and Canada’s open-source contract-tracing apps to become compatible with the Google Apple Exposure Notification System, which was created to provide public health agencies with a framework for exposure notification on iOS and Android. Link

Washington State University adopts open-access publishing model for computer science research. Earlier this month, we discussed an open-access publication deal between the University of California System and Spring Nature. Now, Washington State University has partnered with the Association for Computing Machinery to publish computer science research under open-access terms in the ACM’s Digital Library. Link

Edited by Matt Jensen, Peter Metz, and Jacob Chuslo