The Software Sustainability Institute

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Museo Nobel

Science, Awards and Reproducibility

By Raniere Silva, Community Officer, Software Sustainability Institute As researchers, we have our own motivation to spend years digging into something until we, hopefully, find something new. Independently from our motivation, it is always nice when we receive recognition for our work, specially in the form of a famous award like the Nobel prize. During the announcement of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2018, one of the awardees, Paul M. Romer, highlighted the need to communicate science clearly – not only using simple words and language if you’re writing for a general audience, e.g. a popular science book, but also embracing reproducibility when writing to researchers peers.

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9th ConfOA: the Brazil-Portugal Conference on Open Access

By Raniere Silva, Software Sustainability Institute, Stephan Druskat, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. ConfOA is the Brazil-Portugal Conference about Open Access and the 9th edition was hosted in Lisbon, Portugal between the 2nd and 4th October 2018. Although the conference only has open access in its name, it is the place to talk about the broader concept of open science with many stakeholders.
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Open Community Metrics and Privacy: MozFest18 Recap

By Raniere Silva, Software Sustainability Institute, and Georg Link, University of Nebraska at Omaha. Open communities lack a shared language to talk about metrics and share best practices. Metrics are aggregate information that summarise raw data into a single number, stripping away any context of data. Pedagogical metric displays are an idea for metrics that include an explanation and educates the user on how to interpret the metric. Metrics are inherently biased and can lead to discrimination. Many problems brought up during the MozFest session are worked on in the CHAOSS project.
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News

Reminder: We need your help filling in the 2018 RSE survey

We need your help filling in the  2018 RSE survey. You are eligible if you're working with research software. Previous RSE surveys have targeted specific countries. This year's RSE survey welcomes people from all over the world to participate. Please note the survey will close on 3rd December 2018. The survey takes about 10-15 minutes to complete (ca. 80 questions). Please note that this research is not compulsory and even if you decide to participate you can withdraw at any moment.
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Edinburgh Research Software Engineering (RSE) Community Meeting: 21st November 2018

The Edinburgh RSE Community welcomes anyone in the Edinburgh area, active or interested in the area of resear

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Events

Collaborations Workshop 2018 group photo

Collaborations Workshop 2019

Collaborations Workshop 2019 (CW19) will take place from Monday 1st to Wednesday 3rd April 2019 at Loughborough University in the West Park Teaching Hub. The Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshop series brings together researchers, developers, innovators, managers, funders, publishers, leaders and educators to explore best practices and the future of research software.

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Gateways 2018

The Gateways Conference will take place from Tuesday through Thursday, 25th – 27th September 2018 at the University of Texas, Austin. Science gateways connect components of advanced cyber-infrastructure behind streamlined, user-friendly interfaces. Join gateway creators and enthusiasts to learn, share, connect, and shape the future of gateways.
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HPC Carpentry at University of Leeds

HPC Carpentry will take place on 25th and 26th July 2018 at the University of Leeds. This course is aimed at researchers who have little or no experience of using high performance or high throughput computing but are interested to learn how it could help their research, how they could use it and how it provides additional performance. You need to have previous experience working with the Unix Shell. For a brief introduction to bash, you can refer to the Software Carpentry material available online. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.
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"We are in a position to fundamentally reorganise the heart of the software. By doing so, this will enable us to maintain the software into the future and facilitate the process of adding new functionality to the software ... SSI can assist in having software usable by others not just for a few months or a year, but rather for a much longer software lifetime"

- Eric Rexstad, Distance