ReSA News | February 2022


	View in browser

ReSA Newsletter: February 2022

This month’s news includes:

This month in research software: Community news
ReSA blog: Overview of research software funding landscape
ReSA update
FAIR4RS update
ReSA Steering Committee member profile: Chris Mentzel
Opportunities to get involved with community initiatives
Community events and resources

Community News

Recognition of research software:

The Paris Call on Research Assessment includes an emphasis on valuing the diversity of research activities and outputs, including research software.
G6 Statement on Open Science: The European research organizations who make up the G6 agreed on the principle that research software must meet the same principles and rigorous requirements that researchers expect of their publications, data, samples, devices and infrastructures.

Funding opportunities:

US National Science Foundation (NSF): Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable Open Science Research Coordination Networks (FAIROS RCN). Closes 12 April.
US National Science Foundation (NSF): Research Coordination Networks: Fostering and Nurturing a Diverse Community of CI Professionals (RCN:CIP). Closes 25 April.
US National Science Foundation (NSF): Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (PEOSE). Closes 12 May.
US National Science Foundation (NSF): Training-based Workforce Development for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (CyberTraining). Closes 16 May.
Schmidt Futures Plaintext Group Open Source Software Virtual Incubator.
Netherlands eScience Center Fellows. Closes 11 April.

General news:

Results of the first French national open science awards.
Schmidt Futures launched four Virtual Institutes for Scientific Software at Cambridge, Georgia Tech, Johns Hopkins, and University of Washington.
The German Research Foundation (DFG) has updated its code of conduct for all universities who apply for funding, to include guidelines that explicitly address research software.
A recent blog from GitHub on challenges in measuring the value of open source software flagged the need to understand what extent open source software accelerates scientific research.
Responses to the 2021 US Department of Energy Request for Information on Stewardship of Software for Scientific and High-Performance Computing have been collated by Todd Gamblin to highlight the interesting work occurring (thanks, Todd!).

ReSA blog: Overview of research software funding landscape

ReSA’s latest blog post contains a report provided to the Research Software Funders Forum on the funding landscape for research software throughout its life cycle. Two phases of the life cycle are identified:

Life cycle phase 1: Research and development: The initial period of taking a concept to create actual software that can be used.

Category A: Research software developed within a research project as a by-product to do the research. Most funding for research software fits in this category. However, it is difficult to quantify the amount of investment.
Category B: Research software intentionally developed as a software product for general use in research by one or more projects. Funding for research software through this mechanism is provided by some funders. However, it can be difficult to identify these as opportunities for research software as the funding is often provided within broader frameworks, such as digital infrastructure, technology innovation, and open science

Life cycle phase 2: Maintenance and support: Once software exists, it must be maintained to prevent software collapse (responding to changes in underlying software and hardware) and to keep it useful (fixing bugs, adding new features). Funding for maintenance and support of research software comprises a very short list.

ReSA update

ReSA offers opportunities for community members representing multiple stakeholders to work together to achieve shared goals. As per our Code of Conduct, ReSA welcomes and encourages participation by people of all backgrounds and identities. New opportunities for involvement include:

The ReSA Strategic Plan is open for comments! We welcome input about ReSA activities, including proposed projects, to highlight opportunities for partners.
Watch the video of our webinar on the ReSA People Roadmap and add your initiative/s.

ReSA is delighted to welcome Kimberley Hartley as our newest Community Manager. Kim joined the Research Software Alliance, with support from the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, to facilitate the Research Software Funders Forum. A social anthropologist by training, Kim brings a passion for understanding the ways in which people live in different social and cultural settings globally to her work managing communities. She has extensive experience in academic research administration, including managing research ethics boards, advising diverse stakeholders, and building partnerships.

FAIR4RS update

The ReSA FAIR4RS Roadmap Report provides a summary of progress on the ReSA project to map FAIR for Research Software (FAIR4RS) Roadmap projects into a longer-term framework to improve strategic alignment and potential collaborators/leads for parts of the FAIR4RS Roadmap. The FAIR4RS Roadmap aims to make implementation of the FAIR4RS Principles a reality. Progress in this area will fast-track the adoption of the FAIR4RS Principles to support the significant cultural change needed across the research community to gain the benefits of recognition of a wider range of research outputs.

In November 2021 the FAIR4RS Working Group presented an update on its work at the Research Data Alliance Virtual Plenary 18. The slides, videos (session 1, session 2) and collaborative notes present updates on the subgroups addressing FAIR4RS adoption guidelines, adoption support, and governance.

The FAIR for Virtual Research Environments (VREs) Working Group is also building on the FAIR4RS Principles, alongside work on other FAIR digital objects, and led a session on the path forward. ReSA also co-chaired a workshop on skills and training curriculum to support FAIR for research software, and interested participants can join the email list.

ReSA Steering Committee member profile: Chris Mentzel

Chris Mentzel is executive director of a newly formed data science initiative at Stanford University, which engages the entire campus community in developing and leveraging new data science theory and practice to accelerate research. Previously, Chris started and led the Moore Foundation's Data-Driven Discovery Initiative, an $80 million effort within the Science Program to enable data scientists to turn the scientific data deluge into opportunities to address some of today's most important research questions. An active member of the broader big data and open science communities, Chris serves on several advisory boards and program committees and, pre-COVID, spoke frequently at conferences and workshops on topics related to data-intensive research and the people who make it happen. You can find him on Twitter @chrismentzel.

Opportunities to get involved with community initiatives

Do you write/develop software in a research context? Fill out this survey for the STRIDE project studying people at the heart of software development, and help them learn more about the psychological factors affecting research software engineering.

There are lots of ways to get involved with the US-RSE community. You can join them on Slack, volunteer for an interview with the RSE Stories podcast, see their list of projects and let them know how you’d like to help. US-RSE Working Groups:

Community events and resources

IEEE eScience 2022, 4-11 Oct. Salt Lake City, USA.

Software Sustainability Institute Collaborations Workshop 2022 (CW22), 4-7 April. Online.

Vive la différence - research software engineers, 19-22 April. Hybrid, Leiden, the Netherlands.

US-RSE Association Community building workshop, 26-27 April, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.

SE4Science’22 (International Workshop on Software Engineering for Computational Science), 21-23 June. Hybrid, London, UK.

Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC22), 27-29 June. Hybrid, Basel, Switzerland.

FORCE11 FSCI 2022. 25-29 July, online.

iPRES 2022 (International Conference on Digital Preservation),12-16 Sept. Glasgow, Scotland.

Community resources

CHORUS Software Citation Policies Index (from @CHORUSaccess). Help for authors and publishers.

Software citation. Daniel S. Katz, Shelley Stall. 2021. DOI: 10.3233/ISU-210108

An open code pledge for the neuroscience community. Cooper Smout et al. 2021. DOI: 10.31222/osf.io/vrwm7

The role of software in science: a knowledge graph-based analysis of software mentions in PubMed Central. D. Schindler, et al. 2022. PeerJ Computer Science 8:e835. DOI: doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.835

How Software in the Life Sciences Actually Works (And Doesn’t Work). Elliot Hershberg. 2022. New Science

Sustained software development, not number of citations or journal choice, is indicative of accurate bioinformatic software. Paul P. Gardner, et al. 2022. DOI: 10.1186/s13059-022-02625-x

Webinar: Meeting publisher requirements by including FAIR data, FAIR software, models, notebooks & samples publications.

The CSCCE Community Participation Model:

New Tool Launches for Astronomy Software Users. Announcing the launch of the Asclepias portal and broker, resources that connect software tools with scientific results to make research progress in astronomy faster, more open, and more reproducible. 2022.

A kind-of-brief shared early history of US-RSE. V. Sochat, et al. 2022.

To suggest items for inclusion in ReSA News, please contact info@researchsoft.org.

ReSA's vision is that research software and those who develop and maintain it are recognised and valued as fundamental and vital to research worldwide.The ReSA mission is to bring research software communities together to collaborate on the advancement of the research software ecosystem. ReSA is a fiscally sponsored project of Code for Science and Society.

Update your information

Research Software Alliance

You received this email because you signed up to our community.

Unsubscribe