URSSI Blog

Report from URSSI workshop on research software incubators

Nic Weber • March 28, 2019

Summary At the first URSSI community workshop, a small group of participants started to discuss a model for incubating research software projects. Incubation in this context might include a structured program that helps developers plan a new community-based software project, or improve existing projects that need mentorship, strategy, or other resources in order to sustainably grow. To further explore this topic we brought together 16 experienced funders, community managers, developers, researchers, and software users.

Report from URSSI workshop on software credit, citation, and metrics

Karthik Ram • March 24, 2019

Summary: One of the biggest obstacles to making research software sustainable is ensuring appropriate credit and recognition for researchers who develop and maintain such software. We convened 16 experts over two days to identify core issues around software credit and propose concrete steps that a software institute might take to solve them. We identified six core issues directly related to credit (career paths, individual impact, disincentives in the academic credit model, quality versus impact, recognition of software value, lack of funding) and two broader challenges (lack of funding for maintenance and lack of awareness of best practices).

Software Incubator Workshop: A Synthesis

Sebastian P. Benthall • February 25, 2019

Thanks for comments from: Dan Katz, Suresh Marru, Abby Cabunoc Mayes, Micaela S. Parker, Danielle Robinson, and Nic Weber. Research software is software created by scholarly researchers. Often researchers produce source code that is ‘open’, in alignment with scientific norms. But this code and the research it supports is not always “sustainable”, because it does not have a viable community of developers and users working with it in an ongoing way.

The Molecular Sciences Software Institute: The Time is Ripe for Change

T. Daniel Crawford and Daniel G. A. Smith • February 6, 2019

We are witnessing the early stages of a revolution in the computational molecular sciences. Numerous community codes in quantum chemistry, biomolecular simulation, and computational materials science are beginning to adopt modern, collaborative software engineering practices and tools, to the benefit of the broader field. Over their long history, the computational molecular sciences have emerged as an essential partner with experiment in elucidating the structures and mechanisms that control chemical processes, and, in fact, often precede experiment in the knowledge-based design of new systems.

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