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ReSA Newsletter: May 2021

FAIR4RS Update

The first draft output of the FAIR for Research Software (FAIR4RS) Working Group is now undergoing an internal consultation with the working group members until 30 May. After that, a community review period is expected to start on 8 June and end on 8 July, where members of the Research Software Alliance, FORCE11, and RDA will be invited to provide feedback to the document. Next steps and additional information are shared in posts from the FAIR4RS Working Group.

The consultation and review are the primary channels for the community to engage on the final FAIR4RS draft. The next steps will work towards adoption and implementation of these FAIR4RS principles, which will benefit many stakeholders, for example, increased research reproducibility for research organisations, helping funders clarify their own requirements for software investments, and providing the basis for guidelines on software sharing requirements for publishers.

FAIR4RS Roadmap Update

The FAIR 4 Research Software Roadmap is a ReSA task force that aims to identify key stakeholders in areas arising from the application of the FAIR principles to research software, to guide strategic planning and investment. Two working groups have now been formed to advance particular elements of the Roadmap:

There are a range of other areas where the formation of working groups is being considered to apply FAIR research software, such as curriculums and skills; science gateways and platforms; metadata and interoperability and preservation and archiving. If you are interested in being involved then please contact info@researchsoft.org

Diversity, equity and inclusion in research software engineering

ReSA is submitting a proposal to convene a Lorentz Center workshop on diversity, equity and inclusion in research software engineering in the Netherlands in 2022. This workshop proposes to consider how research software engineering could be reframed to have diversity, equity, and inclusion as a central organizing principle. Community involvement is a key element of research software engineering, and broadening the range of contributors will improve scientific and social outcomes.

There are some great resources available on diversity, equity and inclusion in the software community, including:

The Lorentz Center in the Netherlands is a workshop center that hosts highly interactive international scientific meetings of typically one week in duration, with up to 60 participants.

ReSA Steering Committee update

The ReSA Steering Committee this month bid farewell to one of its founding members, Karthik Ram. Karthik brought a wealth of expertise to the Steering Committee, as co-founder and director of the rOpenSci Project, lead of the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI), and board member of the Software Sustainability Institute, and as a senior scientist at UC Berkeley Institute for Data Science.

The ReSA Steering Committee is responsible for the strategic direction of ReSA. The role of the Steering Committee members is to provide strategic inputs to the development of ReSA, to achieve the ReSA vision that research software is recognised and valued as a fundamental and vital component of research worldwide, and the mission to bring research software communities together to collaborate on the advancement of research software.

Community news

  • 2021 Collegeville Workshop on Scientific Software: Software Teamsis intended to bring together three communities of scientific software developers: academia, industry and laboratories. The aim is to improve awareness of common needs, unique contributions and career paths that span these communities. Submissions are now open for this virtual event, which will be held from July 20-22, 2021.
  • Collaborations Workshop 2021 has published two blog posts discussing Implementing FAIR for research software: attitudes, advantages and challenges - read part one and part twoto better understand this issue.
  • The Software Sustainability Institute published a new guide, How reproducible should research software be?. It defines four levels of reproducibility: barely repeatable, research software for publication, research Software as a tool, and research software as infrastructure.
  • The latest edition of Research Software Engineer (RSE) Stories interviews Mark Abraham from the EuroCC National Competence Centre Sweden on careers structures for RSEs. RSE Stories is an initiative to empower RSEs, produced by and for RSEs, to better understand the many phenotypes and facets that can define an RSE.
  • Daniel S. Katz and Neil Chue Hong are editing aspecial issue of PeerJ CS on software citation, indexing and discoverability. If you are working in this area, please consider submitting it to thisspecial issue. The deadline for abstract submission is July 16, 2021
  • The 2021 US-RSE Virtual Workshop, “A Path Forward for Research Software Engineers”, held on May 24 and 27, 2021, featured talks, community events, and working group sessions. The recordings will be available after the workshop via theUS-RSE YouTube channel.

If you’d like to suggest items for inclusion in ReSA News, please send them to info@researchsoft.org_. To receive ReSA newsletters, join the ReSA google group by sending a blank email to research-software-alliance+subscribe@googlegroups.com and follow us on twitter https://twitter.com/researchsoft.

The Research Software Alliance (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.

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