URSSI Blog

Elevate Research Software: Co-creating a Digital Roadmap

Eric A. Jensen and Daniel S. Katz • October 4, 2023

As algorithms become the new lab assistants in contemporary research, software is no longer a sidebar—it’s the headline. The need to recognize and support software contributions has become imperative. How do we measure and extend the impact of research software? How do we integrate it into academic evaluations? One lens in which to view these types of questions is policy, which can be thought of as involving, research, organizing, and advocacy.

Introducing 'Charting the Course: Policy and Planning for Sustainable Research Software'

Eric A. Jensen • June 22, 2023

Hello research software community! In this blog post, I am going to introduce myself and the research software policy project I am working on with Professor Daniel S. Katz at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign (and Principal Investigator of the project). I am a social scientist with 20+ years of professional experience working on social, policy and institutional aspects of science and technology.

Announcing 4 new grants for URSSI

Karthik Ram, Nic Weber, Kyle Niemeyer, and Daniel S. Katz • September 4, 2022

For many of us who develop, maintain, and use research software, the issue of software sustainability or lack thereof has been an issue near and dear to our hearts. After numerous efforts to address different aspects of this issue over the past decade, we secured funding from the National Science Foundation in 2017 to build US community around this area and architect what an ideal institute might look like. After several workshops involving the wider research community and several pilot activities, we formulated a plan for an institute.

Best Practices for Software Registries and Repositories

Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran, Alice Allen, Allen Lee, Daniel Garijo, Thomas Morrell, SciCodes Consortium • August 4, 2021

(This post is cross-posted on the SciCodes website, the SSI blog, the ASCL blog, and the FORCE11 blog.) Software is a fundamental element of the scientific process, and cataloguing scientific software is helpful to enable software discoverability. During the years 2019-2020, the Task Force on Best Practices for Software Registries of the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group worked to create Nine Best Practices for Scientific Software Registries and Repositories. In this post, we explain why scientific software registries and repositories are important, why we wanted to create a list of best practices for such registries and repositories, the process we followed, what the best practices include, and what the next steps for this community are.

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