Software and research: the Institute's Blog

By Cyril Pernet, University of Edinburgh

I attended Brainhack Global in Warwick on 2nd and 3rd March 2017. On this occasion, I was invited to give a talk on reproducibility and listen to Pia Rothstein’s talk about pre-registration. These somewhat echo two papers published earlier this year: "Scanning the horizon: towards transparent and reproducible neuroimaging research" by Russ Poldrack et al. in Nature Neuroscience and "A manifesto for reproducible science" by Marcus Munafò et al. in Nature Human Behaviour. Here, I’ll talk about these two concepts that are 'new' because of the ease with which computers can nowadays…

By Justin Kitzes, University of California, Berkeley

We are very happy to announce the launch of our open, online book The Practice of Reproducible Research, to be published in print by the University of California Press later this year. In short, this book is designed to demonstrate and teach how research in the data-intensive sciences can be made more reproducible. The book centres on a collection of 31 contributed case studies, in which experienced researchers provide examples of how they combined specific tools, ideas, and practices in order to improve the reproducibility of a real-world research project. These case studies are accompanied by a set of synthesis chapters that introduce and summarise best practices for data-intensive reproducible research.

Within the overall context of reproducibility, our book focuses specifically on the goal of achieving computational reproducibility in individual research projects. We defined a research project as computationally reproducible if a second investigator can recreate the final reported results of the project, including key quantitative findings, tables, and figures, given only a set of files and written instructions. This focus reflects our belief that computational reproducibility forms a first and most foundational goal for individual investigators interested in the broad goals of reproducible…

By Mario Antonioletti, Software Sustainability Institute, Nikoleta Evdokia Glynatsi, Cardiff University, Lawrence Hudson, Natural History Museum, Cyril Pernet, University of Edinburgh, Thomas Robitaille, Freelance.

Running an open-source project with geographically distributed participants is a substantial undertaking. Attracting and retaining participants can be hard. Communicating project progress via social media, websites and mailing lists can take a lot of time, as does organising and running regular meetings since contributors are typically separated both by geography and time zones. It is important to identify mechanisms for (i) attracting participants (social aspect), (ii)  communications and development processes (which can encompass workflows, standards, conventions, project administration) and (iii) remote collaboration. In this blog post, we summarise some social and technical challenges and…

By Blair Archibald, University of Glasgow, Gary Leeming, University of Manchester, Andy South, Freelancer, Software Sustainability Institute Fellows

Software plays a key role in a modern research environment with over 92% of academics reporting the use of research software. With such a large impact there is huge variation in the potential audience for the work of the Software Sustainability Institute across different disciplines. In some areas there already exists best practice, but many may find it difficult to understand the value or justification for making the effort to engage with software sustainability. Our mission, as fellows, is to help them.

As fellows, we need to interact with different stakeholders: the individual researchers who use and write software as part of their general practice, groups and disciplines who use software to enable new results to push their field forward, and policy makers who have global influence over the software conditions of funding and practice. We can target each of these stakeholders differently and provide a justification of improved software practice.

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By Shoaib Sufi, Community Lead

If you are a PhD candidate, Jisc are offering a bursary for you to attend CW17— apply now!

Collaborations Workshop 2017 (CW17) is nearly upon us. It takes place from the 27-29th of March 2017 at the Leeds University Business school.

Day one will have you enthralled with knock out keynotes on The Internet of Things (IoT) and Open Data from real experts who have been there and done it. If you want to know more about this area and can only spare a day, you can choose to come along just for the day. Day one also includes a panel on IoT and Open Data with leading experts from industry, academia and publishing. We then have our signature speed blogging session, where you can write a blog collaboratively about a hot discussion topic. We wrap up day one with a mini-workshop session where you get to explore some of the topics raised in more depth. Evening of day one then moves onto a historical tour of the campus, a time to get cultured and connect with other attendees, and then a…