This month in research software - community news

Recognition of research software:

• AI-generated haikus from the Netherlands eScience Center blog. See this blog post for the eScience Center’s interview with OpenAI’s new chat bot, chatGPT.
• NASA’s Science Mission Directorate has released their updated policy for sharing scientific information. This encourages contributions to open source software and requires that unrestricted mission software is developed openly, scientific software developed as part of a grant is shared openly at the time of publications, and that peer-reviewed software and data are recognised as having commensurate value as peer-reviewed manuscripts.
  
• The importance of research software and the people who develop it, by Van der Walt and Maphanga, includes information about the African research software landscape, and how to join this community.
  
• Hunting for the best bioscience software tool? Check this database, by Hutson, shows how a data set funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative indicates how research software and tools are used across disciplines, and helps developers gain credit for their work.
  
• New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) Director, Nick Jones, shares lessons from the International Funders Workshop: The Future of Research Software, on how to enable research communities to truly value the contributions of research software in underpinning contemporary science.
  
• Understanding how researchers find research software for research practice, by Stevens, describes how researchers in Australia find research software to use or build upon. Key takeaways include that 79% of the respondents rated research software as “essential” to research, and the most popular methods of discovery are search engines like Google (83%) and asking peers (70%).
  
• Explore the first Open Science Indicators dataset—and share your thoughts, by Cadwallader, Morton, and Hrynaszkiewicz, shares some findings of the PLOS Open Science Indicators project, such as the increase in PLOS articles with publicly available code (12% in 2022).
  
• How often do cancer researchers make their data and code available and what factors are associated with sharing? by Hamilton, et al, finds that only 4% of analysis code is shared.
  
• Crucial Computer Program for Particle Physics at Risk of Obsolescence, by von Hippel, describes how the academic reward system is leading to the potential demise of a key piece of software in physics.
  
• Innovators Bridging Research and Software Engineering, by National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), explores the career paths of RSEs who are completely integrated into the research process: writing code, and also publishing, presenting, writing proposals, mentoring students, and more.

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation support for ReSA

ReSA is excited to announce support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support the continuation of the Research Software Funders Forum, a collaboration of funding organisations committed to supporting research software, and those who develop it, as fundamental and vital to research.

Since its inception in 2022, the Funders Forum has provided a formal mechanism for funders to share practices and consider how to address common challenges to achieve the significant cultural change needed across the research sector globally. To date, more than 30 organisations have engaged in the Funders Forum. Members are generating knowledge and using it together to achieve the community’s goals through a variety of activities, including working groups on a multilateral funding call for research software; coordinated funder implementation of FAIR for research software principles; and sustainable and coordinated funding approaches. The International Funders Workshop: The Future of Research Software, which was co-hosted by ReSA and the Netherlands eScience Center in Amsterdam in November 2022, grew out of the Funders Forum. An outcome of the workshop was a draft declaration on funding research software sustainability and a draft adoption plan.

Continuing this collaboration is important, as funders can play a key role in changing practices in the research sector, and an increasing number of funders are now supporting the advancement of research software. Increased focus on research software can provide societal benefits that include accelerating innovation, reducing information-sharing gaps, encouraging innovation, and promoting reproducibility. 

ReSA’s focus aligns with the goals of the Sloan Foundation’s Technology program - Better Software for Science to develop practices, norms, and institutions that can better promote the development and adoption of discovery-enhancing software. See the full proposal on Zenodo (and shortly on Open Grants).

New ReSA task force on research institution policies to support research software

Are you interested in research institution policies that support research software and the people who develop and maintain it, to complement international and national policies? Join this task force to help build our collection of institutional policies and consider how to better share these with stakeholders. To join, please contact info@researchsoft.org - or simply add your organisation’s policy to the list.

Research Computing Teams (RCT) recently wrote about The Turing Way’s institutional policy that supports research software in research organisations, specifically the Research Application Manager (RAM). This document shares measures of success used for the role of a RAM. The following article was initially published in issue #149 of the newsletter – and reprinted with permission from, and many thanks to, RCT.

Product Management and Working with Research Communities

Research Application Managers: Overview - The Turing Way

I’ve mentioned Turing’s great living handbook before, which covers topics like reproducible research, project design, and more.

It also has a section on research infrastructure roles, which includes overviews of key roles like data stewards, community managers, and research software engineers.

Reader Michelle Barker, director of ReSA, emailed me to point out a new kind of role listed in The Turing Way handbook, one that is starting to be actively discussed elsewhere: the Research Application Manager. (“Application” here is in the sense of application of new knowledge or result to a problem elsewhere, not as in a software application).

The problem that funding the role of RAM is meant to address is, quoting from the handbook:

Traditionally, academia is less interested in supporting and rewarding work on:

• Improving and extending existing research outputs/software

• Promoting interoperability of new and existing outputs/software

• Investing in usability, re-usability and user-friendliness of outputs/software (new and existing)

• Co-creating outputs with users from the early stages of the research output lifecycle

• Proactively discovering new real-world applications and use cases beyond the original academic field and investing in their promotion, adaptation and adoption

The problems RAMs are aiming to solve are ones that come up frequently in this newsletter! Back in #119 I talked about RCD research versus RCD development, and that translating research outputs into inputs in other area - moving things along the “technological readiness ladder” (#91) - is an important but underfunded responsibility.

In RCD, our mission is to scale our impact on research and beyond in our communities, while being bound to limited resources. These technology transfer (or research translation, or knowledge transfer, or knowledge mobilization — different fields use different terms) efforts can have substantial impact if they’re done well, by people who understand both the research and the communities that might find it useful.

The Turing Way handbook outlines some key measures for success in RAMs, including:

• Engaging with the research team early on in the project to bring the perspective of potential users of their software tools and to proactively co-create from the early stages

• […]

• Promoting the tools outside the academic field of the original research team

• Approaching the output as a research “product” and bringing an appropriate level of “market intelligence” to the academic team

• “Packaging” or “re-packaging” the tool to improve usability/accessibility to different audiences

As described, this is a pretty creative role, requiring people who can deeply engage with researchers and with potential client communities, and can “think product” as well as direct projects. I’m pretty excited by the fact that this kind of role is being taken increasingly seriously, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for other organizations adopting it.