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ReSA Newsletter: June 2021

FAIR4RS Update

The FAIR for Research Software (FAIR4RS) Working Group is now requesting community review of its first recommendation across the Research Software Alliance (ReSA), Research Data Alliance (RDA) and FORCE11 communities.

This recommendation is a document that presents the FAIR principles for Research Software. It is available for community input via RDA. Your feedback on this document is the final step in finalising the principles. This review will remain open for the community to comment until 11 July 2021. Any further information will be sent via the FAIR4RS mailing list (RDA FAIR4RS WG posts), which you are encouraged to join.

Did you know that the FAIR4RS WG has been presenting updates and hosting conversations three or more times per month every month in 2021? This is an amazing collaborative outcome involving the steering committee and the members of this community. A list of the events and the slides/videos is available in the FAIR4RS engagements table. This includes the recording from "Early outcomes of the FAIR for Research Software Working Group" at RDA VP17. The FAIR4RS WG is organised by a Steering Committee of nine co-chairs: Michelle Barker, Paula Andrea Martinez, Leyla Garcia, Daniel S. Katz, Neil Chue Hong, Morane Gruenpeter, Fotis Psomopoulos, Jennifer Harrow and Carlos Martinez

Upcoming FAIR4RS WG events include:

ReSA Steering Committee member profile

Lou Woodley, founder and director of the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE), joined the ReSA steering committee in her capacity as an expert in building communities in STEM. She has worked with ReSA’s Executive Director and Community Manager to shape the 2021 community engagement plan, and offered input into the People elements of ReSA’s strategy. Her role at CSCCE involves raising awareness of the importance of human infrastructure in successful STEM collaborations. This includes professional development, resource creation, and research activities that support STEM community-builders in their work. From July-September, CSCCE is piloting a new webinar series on planning and facilitating virtual events, which you canfind out more about in the CSCCE website.

Community Events

Upcoming research software community events

In more detail:

Research Software Engineers (RSEs) in HPC Call for submissions

The RSE-HPC-2021 workshop will be held in conjunction with SC21, in the US and online on 15 November, 2021. RSEs are critical to the impact of HPC, data science, and the larger scientific community. RSE-HPC-2021 invites participants to submit a short paper on topics related to RSE issues particularly relevant to HPC, e.g., career paths and professional networks to connect RSEs at universities, national laboratories, and industry. The call for submissions is open until 6 August, 2021. First-time conference presenters and underrepresented members are particularly encouraged to submit.

Community news

  • The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) released the draft national agenda for research software in Australia, and it is now available for review.
  • The G7 Research Compact highlights actions for underpinning effective international collaboration, which includes exploring incentives “that foster recognition and reward collaboration across all disciplines and topics to drive a culture of rapid sharing of knowledge, data, software, code and other research resources.”
  • LIBER Award for Library Innovation Winners, sponsored by OCLC. Recognising the value of software: how libraries can help the adoption of software citation, Neil P. Chue Hong, Jez Cope, Patricia Herterich, Daniel S. Katz, Simon Worthington.
  • The Society of RSE offers financial support for new RSE events and initiatives up to £1000. Formal requests for funding can be made via this form or contactinfo [at] society-rse.org for informal discussion.
  • The News and Media Research Centre of the University of Canberra launched the Digital Commons Policy Council’s inaugural report, “The coproduction of open source software by volunteers and big tech firms” by Mathieu O’Neil, Xiaolan Cai, Laure Muselli, Fred Pailler and Stefano Zacchiroli (video also available).
  • Database of Diverse Databases provides networks and resources to help connect with diverse talented people to achieve a more equitable world. Have a look at the lists “Coding + Tech”, “Tech Policy” and “Science” if you’re looking for collaborators or speakers.
  • RSE Career Pathways Event recordings (Part 1 and 2) from June 17th are now available via the UK Society of Research Software Engineering Youtube channel.

Community surveys

  • Are you connected with a UK-based institution and interested in digital/software requirements in the arts, humanities and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums). Fill in this survey led by the UK Software Sustainability Institute.
  • Do you work with computational notebooks (e.g., Jupyter Notebooks) or virtual research environment (aka Science Gateways)? Ever wondered how they are used? Please complete the Research Infrastructure Survey by Prof Hugh Shanahan from the Royal Holloway, University of London.
  • Do you workin open source/open science project leadership and have a vision of where the project would go long-term? Provide input to identify what are the common elements amongst the more sustainable projects in this survey organised by Yo Yehudi from the University of Manchester.
  • Library representatives are invited to provide institutional responses to how the Carpentries might better meet their training needs. More than one response per institution is welcome. Access the survey run by Library Carpentry Advisory Group.

Research software community organisation profile: CodeMeta

This month we highlight the CodeMeta initiative, created in 2016. CodeMeta is both a scholarly metadata project and a vocabulary that defines and works with metadata that describes software. As a subset of the schema.org SoftwareSourceCode and SoftwareApplications classes, CodeMeta provides additional properties for research software. The FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group has a CodeMeta task force, co-led by Martin Fenner from DataCite and Morane Gruenpeter from Software Heritage. The task force is working on an update of the CodeMeta schema to version 3.0, with the intent of aligning this schema with schema.org metadata.

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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