Wellcome Trust funding

ReSA would like to thank the Wellcome Trust for their support for ReSA’s work in bringing research software communities together to collaborate on the advancement of research software through three programs during 2021:

• FAIR4RS WG project direction to develop community-endorsed FAIR for research software principles
• FAIR4RS Roadmap leadership to map FAIR for research software projects into a longer-term strategic framework
• People Roadmap to support the development of career paths and reward structures to complement the FAIR4RS Roadmap

The mission of the Wellcome Trust is to support science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone.

ReSA’s three focus areas: Spotlight on people

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

• Software landscape analysis taskforce. This task force identified and analysed the research software landscape in this blog posted in 2020. Help us keep the ReSA list of research software communities up to date by making comments in the spreadsheet.
• ReSA is one of the organisations coordinating development of the Research Data Alliance-led Open Science Registry. This registry will support Open Science practices by providing a publicly available, searchable and evidence-based online platform of the intentions and outcomes of ongoing and future policy changes to the research reward and evaluation system.
• ReSA is part of the AccelNet Proposal: Community of Open Scholarship Grassroots Networks (COSGN) led by the Centre for Open Science. COSGN includes 120 grassroots networks and proposes to formalise governance and coordination of the networks to maximise their impact and establish standard practices for sustainability. If the proposal is successful it will help ReSA in its role facilitating connections and communication across communities by leading an open source working group.

The Wellcome Trust funding will also support a series of online workshops in mid-2021 to facilitate the connection of existing research software initiatives that are concerned with people issues related to skills and training, career paths and recognition frameworks etc. This broader strategic work will guide development of a collaborative approach to solving bottlenecks for careers and training in the research software sector.

Building research software communities

Join us for an upcoming SORSE event: Building Research Software Communities: How to increase engagement in your community

• March 17, 2021, 09:00 – 11:00 UTC AND
• March 18, 2021, 09:00 – 11:00 UTC

This workshop will investigate the challenges of building, developing and sustaining research software communities, and will be facilitated by Jeremy Cohen, Michelle Barker and Daniel Nüst. The workshop will be interactive and will provide opportunities for participants to apply knowledge gained to challenges they may have in trying to set up or grow their own communities, and to engage in group discussion to support this.

Speakers include Lou Woodley (Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement - CSCCE), Toby Hodges and Serah Rono (both from The Carpentries).

FAIR4RS Update

The ReSA/RDA/FORCE11 FAIR for Research Software (FAIR4RS) working group invites you to participate in creating community-endorsed FAIR principles for research software and encouraging their adoption. There are multiple ways to get involved, from receiving news, to co-writing, presenting outputs and leading your own events related to FAIR4RS.

The first combined output of the FAIR4RS working group is now available for review from 24 Feb 2021 - 10 Mar 2021. This review document discusses the results of the FAIR4RS subgroups. Feedback on the questions posed in this report will be used to inform the scope, requirements, and priorities for future outputs.

During eResearch NZ 2021, a FAIR4RS discussion was led by Georgina Rae, Maxime Rio and Nooriyah Lohani from NeSI and the RSE AU-NZ community. Most attendees were involved in developing or maintaining research software and/or infrastructure. This workshop is one example of regional community leadership to share information about FAIR4RS and provide a venue for community discussion. The workshop aimed to identify examples of best practice in creating FAIR software, which includesmaterials from previous events such as:

• A recent presentation by Morane Gruenpeter and Daniel S. Katz at PIDapalooza (Jan 27, 2021) PIDs for software - shedding some light on a dark puzzle: slides & video are available
• FAIRsFAIR Work Package 2 - FAIR Practices: Semantics, Interoperability, and Services by Morane Gruenpeter and Hylke Koers. This work overlaps the FAIR4RS WG (Nov 2020): video & report are available

OECD Recommendation on Access to Research Data now includes software

The OECD’s Recommendation concerning Access to Research Data from Public Funding aims to establish access and global sharing of research data as a major policy priority, with the ultimate goal of making the global science system more efficient and effective. ReSA is proud to have been involved in this work, with the revised recommendation now including “bespoke algorithms, workflows, models and software (including code) that are essential for their interpretation”.

OECD recommendations become soft law for member states, meaning that they are not legally binding but are intended to influence conduct. The OECD Innovation Blog highlights the potential impact of the work.

Community news

• ReSA co-founder and steering committee member Daniel S. Katz was interviewed in a recent episode of the RSE Stories podcast, talking about citation practices and software, and the importance of policy and people.
• Dryad and Zenodo have been doing some great work on integration, read their Doing it Right: A Better Approach for Software & Data. Join the Dryad and Zenodo integration webinar on March 4, 2021 11am EST and learn how to use Dryad to publish your data and code!
• csv,conf is happening again online on May 4 & 5. Talks are welcomed about data sharing and data analysis from science, journalism, government, and open source, and talk submissions close on 28 Feb.
• The 17th IEEE eScience 2021 International Conference is on September 20-23, 2021. The call for workshops closes on March 15 and paper/abstract and tutorial submissions are due on April 7, 2021.
• The Wellcome Open Research Fund is open for proposals until March 12, 2021, with a focus on incentivising openness in health research.

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.