Posted by r.ainsworth on 20 February 2020 - 4:34pm 

By Rachael Ainsworth, Community Manager, Software Sustainability Institute

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

One of the many opportunities to start a new collaboration during the Software Sustainability Institute's Collaborations Workshop 2020 (CW20) is during the mini-workshops and demo sessions. This year we’ll have sessions on Community and Scholarly Communication in addition to the themes of CW20: Open Research, Data Privacy and Software Sustainability. There were so many outstanding submissions for sessions, that for CW20 we have replaced the panel sessions in order to include more of them. Mini-workshops and demo sessions will take place the 31st - 1st April 2019 in the the Peter Froggatt Centre at Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland. Here are some examples of the sessions that we will host.

Find out more about CW20 and register on Eventbrite.

Open Research

To achieve a shift in research culture, additional skills are needed that are not covered by traditional professional development offers for researchers. To support researchers in new open practices, a range of professional roles such as research software engineers and data stewards have been developed over the last few years that provide training, support and guidance to address new funder requirements and facilitate cultural change.

Patricia Herterich will facilitate a session on Professionalising support for Open Research. This workshop will bring data stewards and research software engineers together and provide an insight into case studies of initiatives to professionalise roles supporting open research from a range of countries. Group discussions will address challenges that those professions still face to get recognised and explore opportunities for collaboration on policy changes, professional development and hands-on cooperation in institutions.

Data Privacy

Data privacy must be considered with regard to collecting, transferring, processing, anonymising, sharing, storing, archiving, deleting and the security of research data. Understanding what types of data you’re collecting as a research community and how that data moves through your design process can be a daunting task.

Phil Hesketh will lead the session Research Data Discovery Workshop. With the outcomes from the session, participants will be able to: map out the flow of data, from capture to deletion for a particular research method; understand any risks in your process that might inform a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) or data policies; think about how we might improve existing processes from a practical starting point; and write more accurate informed consent forms.

Citable Code/Software Sustainability

Many universities use systems like Pure, Simplectic, RIS, to name a few, to record research publications, e.g. to display them on their webpages and, in the UK, for preparing submissions for REF (Research Excellence Framework) and reporting research outputs to funding bodies, while software outputs are much less common there. We believe that scientific code needs to be treated as a primary research output, and should be equally well covered by Current Research Information Systems (CRIS).

In the session Towards software REF submissions with Code4REF, Olexandr Konovalov, Diego Alonso Álvarez, Louise Brown, Patricia Herterich, and Patrick McCann will present the Code4REF project which aims at providing guidelines on recording research software in CRIS. Participants will learn the benefits of reporting research software in CRIS, and how they can help the project in various capacities, from advocacy to direct contributions to the guidelines.

Community

Many journals require that scientific/research outputs, such as data, protocols and code are openly available in order to be reviewed and reused by other researchers. Sharing source code and research papers alone isn’t usually enough to draw in new users and contributors who can collaboratively advance the field.

Malvika Sharan and Yo Yehudi will facilitate the session Open Life Science: Empowering communities with open* principles. This session will teach researchers and coders the basic principles to make their projects (i.e, scientific code repositories) not only open, but inclusive and welcoming to contributors, allowing scientific and research software to be more sustainable, reproducible, and accessible both to users and to other software developers. 

Scholarly Communication

"As-you-go" iterative scholarly communication system based on the peer-to-peer knowledge commons (instead of "after-the-fact" publications) may help to start addressing scholarly research's core issues with respect to access, archival, provenance, incentives, and quality by embedding chronology and new peer-to-peer technologies in the communication design. This aims to also help make research management more effective and facilitate the reproducibility of outputs.

Chris Hartgerink will introduce Hypergraph: open "as-you-go" research communication, which feeds into a more cooperative and permissive spirit of scholarly communication, and allows for equal recognition of code and text based outputs by placing them as all simply parts of the same process. He will give a live demonstration of Hypergraph for the first time, showing that this parallel form of scholarly communication is available today without restrictions on current operations. Participants are invited to give feedback for tooling they would like to see to make their everyday research life easier.

But wait, there’s more!

We’ll be running lots of other mini-workshops and demo sessions, and you can find them all on the agenda.

Register for CW20 on Eventbrite