Posted by n.chuehong on 10 September 2015 - 10:36am

By Simon Hettrick, Deputy Director and Policy Lead.

August saw the foundation of a new group to support Research Software Engineers, the release of a paper that had many in the community up in arms, and progress towards a better understanding of who’s being employed in UK academia. We’re also looking for community editors for our blog!

Supporting the leaders of Research Software Engineers

We’re now seeing the rise of groups of Research Software Engineers across the UK. This is fantastic news both for our campaign and, more importantly, for UK research.

The creation of RSE groups brings with it a new problem: how do we share information so that everyone benefits from the success of other groups (and no one repeats the failures). The easiest way is to bring together the leaders of RSE groups for regular meetings, which we hope will foster an air of open communication. The first formal meeting of this group took place on 3 August at the University of Southampton.

The purpose of the Research Software Engineers Leaders (RSEL) is to help leaders of research software groups share information and resources. It’s not easy setting up a new type of group in academia, so there’s plenty of room to benefit from the experience of others. By sharing resources, such as training materials and job descriptions, we can reduce duplication of effort which saves time for other work. The RSEL will use its combined experience to develop reports on issues that affect research software groups, such as determining a career path for RSEs, understanding how to finance a research software group and developing metrics that show the impact of a research software group. Notes from the meeting are available.

This month also saw the next meeting of the UK RSE Association being organised by the current Co-Chairs Mark Stillwell and James Hetherington. The meeting takes place in October, so expect an update on the community at that time.

What price open source?

We were made aware of a recent paper from Krylov et al. which discussed the problems with open source in academia. Some of the paper’s conclusions caused some controversy, especially on Twitter, so we decided to team up with Dan Katz from the NSF and Andrew Jones from NAG to prepare a response.

Our response outlined what I believe is a sensible approach to software development in academia. Software developed in research should be released under an open-source licence by default. However, this does not mean that researchers who develop software with appeal to a market should be prevented from commercialising that software. Since so much research software has a very limited market, we can’t expect proprietary software to fulfill the needs of researchers. But just because a researcher can’t profit from their software, doesn’t mean that other researchers can’t benefit from it.

If you want to know more about the debate, you can read the paper that started it all, the response by Krylov et al., our response to both papers and comments on our response from one of the Krylov et al. authors.

Community editors

We’ve published some interesting series of blog posts, everything from Desert Island Hard Disks to Heroes of Software Engineering. To continue expanding on these series, we’re looking for community editors. It’s not just about our established blog series, we’re also looking for ideas for new ones.

We’re looking for people with both a passion for research and the written word (and editing skills either established or nascent!). If would like to know more, let us know.