ReSA News: September 2020

ReSA’s three focus areas

ReSA has three main focus areas: policy, people and infrastructure. We’ll be profiling the work we do in each in future newsletters. Policy, infrastructure, people

FAIR4RS events

The FAIR4RS team is very busy engaging with the community at a range of events. Upcoming talks include:

Toward defining and implementing FAIR for research software, at Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA) Data Science Leadership Summit, 13 October 2020
FAIR4RS WG workshop at RDA Plenary 16, 9-13 November 2020 (date TBC)
FAIR 4 Research Software workshop at [SORSE}(https://sorse.github.io/programme/), 16-20 November 2020 (date TBC)
Research Software Developers Day, a joint effort between ELIXIR Belgium and the VIB Bioinformatics Core - 3 December 2020

Events in previous months include the US-RSE workshop as part of PEARC20 (slides), FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute (slides and recording), Workshop on FAIR Computational Workflows - ECCB 2020 ELIXIR track, NZ RSE (slides), and RDA France (in French).

What do we (not) know about RSE

Upcoming SORSE events involving ReSA in late October include {What do we (not) know about RSE?}](https://sorse.github.io/programme/workshops/event-017/) Research Software Engineering (RSE) is increasingly being established as a field and profession in its own right. Since the term was coined about a decade ago, RSE has also been the subject of empirical research to gain knowledge and evidence about the various aspects involved.

This workshop aims to assess what we do and do not know about RSE. The participants will work together to collect and classify existing empirical research about RSE, and identify “blind spots” where further research is needed. After the workshop we plan to turn these findings into a review paper that describes both the current knowledge and open questions, suitable to serve as a roadmap for further research about RSE. All participants will be invited to contribute as co-authors. You can register here.

SORSE is A Series of Online Research Software Events - an international answer to the COVID-19-induced cancellation of many national RSE conferences, to provide an opportunity for RSEs to develop and grow their skills, build new collaborations and engage with RSEs worldwide.

Community news

If you have an idea for how to make scientific software better, and you are affiliated with a US institution that can receive $25,000 from the DOE, you can apply for a Better Scientific Software (BSSw) Fellowship, with applications due 30 Sept.
The 2020 Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA) Annual Meeting (14-16 October) is free and virtual, and brings together data science methodologists and domain researchers from all disciplines and career stages to share breakthroughs and new approaches in data science research and education, with a strong emphasis on responsible data science.
JupyterCon 2020 (5 - 17 October) virtually brings together data scientists, business analysts, researchers, educators, developers, core Project contributors, and tool creators for in-depth training, insightful keynotes, and practical talks exploring the Project Jupyter platform.
The GitHub CLI (command line interface) 1.0 is now available.
On 31 August, the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) published its 1000th paper. JOSS is a developer friendly, free-to-publish, open-access journal for research software packages.
The Festival of Maintenance and software is a new blog post by 2019 Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, Laura James. The Festival of Maintenance is a celebration of those who maintain different parts of the software world, recognising the often hidden work.

If you’d like to suggest items for inclusion in ReSA News then please contact us. If you would to engage with the ReSA community, then join the ReSA Google group to receive email updates. To subscribe send a blank email to research-software-alliance+subscribe@googlegroups.com

ReSA is a community of influencers and members of major research software communities, programs, organisations and individuals. ReSA’s vision is that research software be recognised and valued as a fundamental and vital component of research worldwide. The ReSA mission is to bring research software communities together to collaborate on the advancement of research software. ReSA is a fiscally sponsored project of Code for Science and Society.