First a piece of good news! We’ve received some funding and we will let you know how we’re using that in the New Year.

Update from the taskforce on evidence for the importance of research software

The ReSA taskforce on evidence for the importance of research software is collecting evidence about the importance of software in research. That evidence can be from newspapers, blogs, peer-reviewed journals, policy documents, or even tweets. Please join ReSA’s Zotero group and contribute to our group library. Anyone can contribute by joining, and the group library is openly accessible. You can also send suggested additions to Matthias Liffers for addition to the library. We will shortly update the ReSA resources page to promote and link to the library, and will also update this page utilising information in the library. In January 2020 we will also begin analysis of the library to create a blog/article highlighting the topic. If you are interested in being part of this taskforce, or if you have any questions, please contact ReSA.

Community news

The second application cycle for the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative’s Essential Open Source for Science program opened December 16, 2019, and will close February 4, 2020. CZI is looking to support the maintenance, growth, development, and community engagement of open source software projects to help make the computational foundations of biological research more usable and robust. Note that this program will support both biological research software as well as the more foundational software that supports biological and other types of research.

Now that FAIR data has been on everyone’s lips for a while, perhaps it’s time to talk about FAIR software. A session at the Netherlands National eScience Symposium focused the discussion of FAIR and its meaning for research software, as described in this blog post: https://blog.esciencecenter.nl/fair-software-at-the-2019-escience-symposium-6117f310aa34 and https://software.ac.uk/blog/2019-12-05-fair-software-2019-escience-symposium

Teresa Gomez-Diaz and Tomas Recio have published a paper “On the evaluation of research software: the CDUR procedure” which proposes a new assessment procedure for research software, based on an evaluation of current procedures and the authors’ experience from the PLUME initiative.

Read The Copyright Guide for Scientific Software for clear, easy-to-read answers to common questions about how scientific software and copyright interact:

Computational Research Software: Challenges and Community Organizations Working for Culture Change