URSSI Blog

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.

Evidence for the importance of research software

Michelle Barker, Daniel S. Katz, Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran • June 8, 2020

(This post is cross-posted on the SSI blog and the Netherlands eScience Center blog, and is archived as https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3873832) This blog analyses work evidencing the importance of research software to research outcomes, to enable the research software community to find useful evidence to share with key influencers. This analysis considers papers relating to meta-research, policy, community, education and training, research breakthroughs and specific software. The Research Software Alliance (ReSA) Taskforce for the importance of research software was formed initially to bring together existing evidence showing the importance of research software in the research process.

Scientific Software Projects and Their Communities

Rene Gassmoeller • March 24, 2020

Improving the state of scientific software requires focusing on the people behind the software. (This post is cross-posted on the BSSw blog.) In the past several years, we have seen a growing consensus that improving the state of scientific software requires focusing on the people behind the software. This is particularly true for the software engineers and scientists developing the software and for the maintainers and leaders of projects, but also for whole projects improving their software development processes.

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