About the Policy project
Approach and Activities
To achieve its goals, Charting the Course employed a multifaceted, evidence-informed approach. The team (led by Principal Investigator Prof. Daniel S. Katz and researcher Dr. Eric A. Jensen) collected data on existing policies and practices through literature reviews, stakeholder interviews, and direct community input. Early in the project, the team issued a public call to action via the LSE Impact Blog, inviting broad participation in identifying the needs and values of the research software community. This helped set the stage and gather initial ideas from researchers, software engineers, funders, and institutional leaders about the most pressing policy issues.
A core activity of the project was organizing participatory workshops to engage the community in frank discussions about challenges and opportunities in research software policy. Notably, the team convened an international workshop at the IEEE eScience Conference (October 2023 in Cyprus), which brought together research software practitioners and policymakers from around the world. This workshop facilitated focused discussions on two key themes: career paths for research software professionals and diversity and inclusion in the research software community. By structuring conversations around these areas, the project gathered qualitative evidence on the sociotechnical barriers people face and brainstormed potential solutions in a collaborative setting.
The project researcher also led a three-day workshop on monitoring and evaluating research software impact at the Research Software Alliance’s Funders Forum.
Finally, an institutional survey was undertaken at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to understand the role of research software policy at the level of individual researchers’ experiences.
Fostering online collaboration for research software policy challenges
In addition to in-person events, the project leveraged online collaboration. Building on planning work initiated by the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI), the team compiled 44 concrete ideas and recommendations for actions that could elevate the status of research software in academia - ranging from new funding mechanisms and citation practices to better training, recognition, and hiring policies.
➡️ These ideas were posted publicly as GitHub issues: https://github.com/si2-urssi/policy/issues.
Each idea was tagged by type (e.g. research, advocacy, education), topic (such as career path, impact, maintenance, or diversity), and estimated scale of effort, creating a structured menu of potential policy interventions.