Happy New Year!

In the last newsletter, we teased you with news of funding for ReSA. We’re happy to announce that we have received $40k from the Moore Foundation to support ReSA community engagement - more details in future newsletters. We are also delighted to announce that ARDC are providing some in kind funding to support ReSA, which is enabling ARDC’s Matthias Liffers to support the ReSA Taskforces. Welcome, Matthias!

Events

A session on “FAIR principles for research software” will be held at the next Research Data Alliance Plenary in Melbourne: https://www.rd-alliance.org/fair-principles-research-software This builds on the discussion started by the paper “Towards FAIR principles for research paper” https://content.iospress.com/articles/data-science/ds190026 and will include discussion of forming a ReSA Taskforce / WG on FAIR software, in partnership with RDA and FORCE11. Remote participation is available.

NL-RSE (The Netherlands Research Software Engineer Community) are organising regular meetups to encourage collaboration and communication between Research Software Engineers in the Netherlands. The meetings are organized at the fantastic facilities of SURF in Utrecht. This venue is less than 5 minutes walking distance from the central railway station in Utrecht, direction of Hoog Catharijne. https://nl-rse.org/pages/meetups.html

Save the date: #deRSE20 - 2nd international conference for research software engineers in Germany will be 25-27 August @ the University of Jena

Calls

CANARIE have launched a call to fund software development teams at Canadian Higher-education Institutions to directly support researchers. Following the success of a pilot and similar efforts deployed in European countries, CANARIE’s Local Research Software Support call will fund teams of three dedicated, full-time research software developers at a target of six participating institutions.: https://www.canarie.ca/canarie-launches-call-to-fund-software-development-teams-at-canadian-higher-ed-institutions-to-directly-support-researchers/

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s second call for Essential Open Source Software for Science closes soon: (February 4) https://chanzuckerberg.com/rfa/essential-open-source-software-for-science/

Other news

Vanessa Sochat, an RSE for Stanford Research Computing, has written a blog article on the Disney FairyTale Bias and how frames of reference can bias thinking on the lifecycle of research software: https://vsoch.github.io/2020/disney-fairytale-bias/

Join the preservation revolution and add a direct link from your repository to the Software Heritage archive! https://www.softwareheritage.org/2020/01/13/the-swh-badges-are-here/

Submit your software stories (by January 31). The Software Preservation Network’s EaaSI project is looking for software that has been particularly significant in your personal or professional life: http://bit.ly/2sfvKcy

Finally, a big thank you to Claire Wyatt, who contributed her time as a Community Manager to ReSA in the latter part of 2019. We look forward to continuing to benefit from your expertise in your work with the RSE community and Society of Research Software Engineering.