ReSA’s three focus areas: Spotlight on policy

ReSA has three main focus areas: policy, people and infrastructure. This month’s newsletter highlights ReSA work in the policy space to achieve the ReSA aim that research software be recognised and valued as a fundamental and vital component of research worldwide. ReSA taskforces in this area have achieved outcomes including:

• Development of research software sharing guidelines for policy makers, funders, publishers and researchers for inclusion in the Research Data Alliance COVID-19 Guidelines and Recommendations.
• Supporting the inclusion of software in the OECD Committee for Science and Technology Policy recommendations (which will become soft law for OECD member states).
• Engagement with the UNESCO Open Science consultation. The first draft of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science is now available.

The taskforce on the evidence for the importance of research software completed analysis to support policy discussions in this blog posted by URSSI, SSI and Netherlands eScience Centre in June 2020. This work identified and analysed resources that demonstrate the importance of research software to research outcomes, to provide information for sharing with key influencers.

ReSA Steering Committee says farewell to Catherine Jones

ReSA would like to thank Catherine Jones for her contributions as a member of the ReSA Steering Committee. Catherine has served on this committee since its inception two years ago, bringing significant expertise in software engineering and governance of not-for-profit organisations.

In November ReSA called for nominations for new members to join the Steering Committee in 2021 and will be announcing the new committee members shortly.

Recent ReSA talks

ReSA has been involved in the following workshops in November to engage our community - check out the resources and notes:

RDA Virtual Plenary 16, November 2020

• {Building a FAIR Roadmap for Research Software](https://www.rd-alliance.org/building-fair-roadmap-research-software) - slides and collaborative notes
• FAIR 4 Research Software (FAIR4RS): Progress Update - slides and collaborative notes

{DaMALOS: Research data management for Linked Open Science](https://zbmed.github.io/damalos/), November 2020

• Software as a first-class citizen in research - paper, slides, and video

SORSE, November 2020

• FAIR 4 Research Software - slides and collaborative notes

International FAIR Convergence Symposium, December 2020

• Building a FAIR Roadmap for research software roadmap - slides and collaborative notes

AGU Fall meeting, December 2020

• Software Updates: Software Citation, FAIR4RS, ReSA, JOSS (in Data FAIR town hall: Software—Moving Our Community to Accept Software/Code Sharing and Citation) - slides
• Toward defining and implementing FAIR for research software (in session on “FAIR Data is not Enough: Communicating Data Quality and Making Analytical Code FAIR”) - slides

ReSA Code of Conduct

ReSA now has a Code of Conduct that members of the ReSA community are expected to adhere to. This Code of Conduct should be honored in any ReSA related activities, by anyone claiming affiliation with ReSA, and especially when someone is representing ReSA in any role (including as an event volunteer or speaker). This Code of Conduct has been adapted from the US-RSE Association Code of Conduct, which builds on the work of NumFocus and others.

Community news

• Series of Online Research Software Events (SORSE) events in 2021 include Research Software and the Modelling of COVID-19 in the UK by Mathew Bluteau on January 11.
• The call for submissions for mini-workshops and social activities at Collaborations Workshop 2021 (March 30 - April 1, virtual) is now open! Submit your ideas on sessions related to FAIR Research Software, Diversity & Inclusion and Software Sustainability. Registration for the event is also open now.
• For those in the UK, applications for SSI Fellowships are now open, through February 5. This programme provides funding for researchers who want to improve how research software is used in their domains and/or area of work. Each Fellow is given £3,000 to spend over fifteen months, for any activities that meet both the Fellow’s and the Institute’s goals, such as travel to workshops, running training events such as software carpentry, data carpentry or library carpentry, nurturing or contributing to communities of practice, collaborating with other Fellows, or for any other activities that relate to computational practice or policy. ( If you work at the interface of software engineering and computational science, increasingly manifested in the emerging discipline of Research Software Engineering (RSE or RSEng), consider submitting a paper to the next International Workshop on Software Engineering for Computational Science, which will take place as part of the International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS), 16-18 June, 2021. Submissions are due January 15 (likely to be extended to early February)

Some holiday reading suggestions:

• The Scholarly infrastructures for research software Report from the EOSC Executive Board Working Group Architecture Task Force SIRS has been published. This report is dedicated to the future of scholarly infrastructures relevant for research software, addressing in particular the issues one faces when archiving, referencing and describing (research) software source code, as well as giving proper credit to its authors.
• Software as a first-class citizen in research by Garcia Castro et al. This position paper discusses current efforts around FAIR for research software that will also support the advancement of Software Management Plan
• How do RSE groups work? By Usher et al. (a blog post from the [2nd International RSE Leaders Workshop 2020])https://researchsoftware.org/2020-workshop.html). As explained in a tweet by Stephan Druskat: Demand for RSE is grows, groups start and get larger. But how do they work? How to organize one? Read to learn more!

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’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.