ReSA blog: Evidence for the importance of research software

The ReSA Taskforce on evidence for the importance of research software presented its outcomes in a blog posted by URSSI, SSI and Netherlands eScience Centre in early June. This work identified and analysed resources that demonstrate the importance of research software to research outcomes, to provide information for sharing with key influencers. This analysis considers papers relating to meta-research, policy, community, education and training, research breakthroughs and specific software.

FAIR for Research Software update

The FAIR 4 Research Software Working Group (FAIR4RS WG) is conducting two webinars to update members on how you can engage with the WG on their aims to coordinate a range of existing community-led discussions on how to define and effectively apply FAIR principles to research software, to achieve adoption of these principles.

The webinar will provide details of four subgroups that have been formed to advance the first aim of the WG, to define FAIR guiding principles for research software, and how to join these. The four subgroups will work until end of September 2020 on the following tasks:

1. “A fresh look at FAIR for Research Software” will examine the FAIR principles in the context of research software from scratch, not based on pre-existing work. Lead: Daniel S. Katz
2. FAIR work in other contexts will examine efforts to apply FAIR principles to different forms including workflows, notebooks and training material, to provide insights for the definition and implementation of FAIR principles for research software. Lead: Mateusz Kuzak
3. Definition of research software will review existing definitions of research software and will specify the scope for the WG outputs. Lead: Morane Gruenpeter
4. Review of new research related to FAIR Software will review new research around FAIR software that has come out since the release of the Towards FAIR principles for research software paper in August 2019. Lead: Neil Chue Hong

The same webinar will be offered at two different times, and a recording will subsequently be made available:

• 29 June 20:00 UTC - convert to your timezone. Register here.
• 30 June 07:30 UTC - convert to your timezone. Register here.

The FAIR4RS WG can be joined here and is jointly convened as an RDA Working Group, FORCE11 Working Group, and Research Software Alliance (ReSA) Taskforce.

Community news

If you collaborate or consult with data scientists (or wish you could) then please take this short survey from the Academic Data Science Alliance. Responses are welcome from any geographic region. The results may help push for better policies ad more university funding for data science.

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is inviting applications in support of open source software projects that are essential to biomedical research through their Essential Open Source Software for Science program. The goal of the program is to support software maintenance, growth, development, and community engagement for these critical tools.

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