The Research Software Alliance (ReSA) and the Community Landscape
Daniel S. Katz, Michelle Barker, Paula Andrea Martinez, Hartwig Anzt, Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran, and Tom Bakker • March 11, 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.3699949) ReSA’s mission is to bring research software communities together to collaborate on the advancement of research software. Its vision is to have research software recognized and valued as a fundamental and vital component of research worldwide. Given our mission, there are multiple reasons that it’s important for us to understand the landscape of communities that are involved with software, in aspects such as preservation, citation, career paths, productivity, and sustainability.
Report from the URSSI Winter School pilot
Karthik Ram, Kyle Niemeyer, and Jeffrey Carver • January 29, 2020
In late December 2019, we ran our first ever URSSI school on research software engineering (https://github.com/si2-urssi/winterschool#tentative-schedule). We began accepting applications in July and received an overwhelming response to our call for applications. For the 30 participant slots available, we received 169 applications, meaning we had a challenging time selecting the participants and had to turn away a large number of interested researchers. Our students came from 22 different universities/research institutes, mostly graduate students (19 students, 8 postdocs, and 1 professional researcher), and from fields such as astrophysics, bioinformatics, chemical engineering and neuroscience.
FAIR Software at the 2019 eScience Symposium
Ben van Werkhoven (Netherlands eScience Center, NL-RSE), James Meakin (Radboud UMC, NL-RSE), Anna-Lena Lamprecht (Utrecht University), Stephan Druskat (DLR, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin), Pablo Rodriguez-Sanchez (Netherlands eScience Center) • December 9, 2019
(reposted from the Netherlands eScience Center blog) Image by Netherlands eScience Center FAIR data has been on everybody’s lips for a while. Many think that FAIR software will become “the next big thing” in eScience. Reasons enough to devote a session at the National eScience Symposium to the discussion of FAIR and its meaning for research software. James Meakin from Radboud UMC and NL-RSE started by introducing the topic for the session.
Software Sustainability in the Molecular Sciences
Theresa L. Windus & T. Daniel Crawford • November 14, 2019
The molecular sciences — including chemistry, materials, biophysics and biochemistry — have a long history of developing software to answer core scientific questions. The field also has a long history of challenges to software sustainability. This blog post discusses some of the software sustainability challenges and the opportunities/possible solutions that the Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI) is working toward with the molecular sciences software development community. The MolSSI is an NSF-funded project that is a nexus for science, education, and cooperation for the global computational molecular sciences community.
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