Updates from the Software Sustainability Institute
1 November 2021
Software is fundamental to research. Seven out of ten researchers at fifteen Russell Group universities reported that without it their work would be impossible. The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) facilitates the advancement of software in research by cultivating better, more sustainable, research software to enable world-class research. The Institute is based at the Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford and Southampton, and has funding from all seven research councils.
Research Software Camps
This year the Software Sustainability Institute started running Research Software Camps – free online events running over two weeks which explore topics around research software. The first Camp in February focused on helping researchers make their research accessible. The Camp involved keynote talks, workshops, guides and blogs on the website and engaging social media content.
The next Camp, Beyond the Spreadsheet, will run from 1–12 November and explore the uses of spreadsheets in research and first steps into further use of software in research. Sign up for updates on this and future Camps:
https://edin.ac/3lS2RLp
Hidden REF awards
The SSI supported the Hidden REF Awards which took place in September, celebrating all research outputs and everyone involved in their creation. The Hidden REF committee will continue to lobby for a broadening of research recognition, and will work on publicising its approach to the assessment of novel research outputs and hidden research roles. You can watch the award ceremony, and hear from all of the winners, on YouTube:
https://edin.ac/3kx9zHi
Simon Hettrick, SSI Deputy Director and Chair of the Hidden REF said: “The Hidden REF awards showed that a volunteer-run campaign could recognise everybody who is vital to research. Our next goal is to help organisations adopt our methods so that they can also recognise the full breadth of contributions people make to research.”
Research England has invited Simon Hettrick and two other Hidden REF committee members to take part in a scoping meeting about the future of research evaluation.
GitHub citation
Researchers can now easily cite the software they use with GitHub’s new built-in citation support, giving proper credit and recognition to those who develop research software. The SSI is proud to have supported the new Citation File Format (CFF).
SSI’s Director, Neil Chue Hong, a co-author of CFF and co-chair of the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation working group, said: “Initiatives like the Citation File Format, and the support for it from GitHub, Zenodo and Zotero will encourage visibility and adoption of software citation by the mainstream of researchers by removing barriers to citing software directly.”
Intermediate Software Carpentry course
The SSI has been developing and piloting a new Intermediate Software Development training course over the past year and a half. The new course provides intermediate research software development skills as a next step to courses like Software Carpentry. It teaches skills like developing software using feature branch workflow in Git, unit testing and Continuous Integration with GitHub’s Actions, object-oriented and functional programming, practical software architecture and design, and releasing your code to the world.
The material will be made available to the community for comments via the Carpentries Incubator in October 2021. We expect it to graduate into a more stable stage by the end of the year and be ready for reuse and teaching by the wider community beyond the material creators.
UKRI Innovation scholarship collaborations
The SSI is proud to be involved in three successful bids to the UKRI Innovation Scholars: Data Science Training in Health and Bioscience initiative.
The programme’s key objective is to produce training opportunities for researchers in areas ranging from bioinformatics to the social sciences, to give them the self-confidence and skills to manage and analyse their data. Collaborating with these projects will bring together the SSI’s extensive training expertise towards improving research software practices within the Health and Bioscience domains.
Read more about the three projects at: https://edin.ac/3zyxkD1
Fellowship programme shortlisting underway
The Institute’s Fellowship Programme provides funding for individuals who want to improve how research software is used in their area of work. Each Fellow is awarded £3,000 to spend over fifteen months. This funding can be used for any activities that meet both the Fellow’s and the Institute’s goals, such as travel to workshops, running training events, nurturing or contributing to communities of practice, collaborating with other Fellows, or for any other activities that relate to improving computational practice or policy. The Programme’s next successful applicants will be announced on 13 January 2022.
About the Software Sustainability Institute
The Software Sustainability Institute is a national facility for building better software. We help researchers introduce software into their research or improve the software they already use.
The Institute’s vision is to create a world where software is treated as a first-class citizen and is sustainable, enabling better research. Sustainability means that the software used today will be available – and continue to be improved and supported – in the future.