“The near-ubiquity of software [in research] means that it is not possible to disentangle the quality of the software from the quality of the research.
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By Simon Hettrick, Deputy Director.
This article originally appeared in Research Fortnight.
With few exceptions, every significant advance in research over at least the past 30 years would have been impossible without computer software. Research software—used to produce results rather than for, say, word processing or web searches—has spread far beyond traditionally computational fields such as particle physics and bioinformatics to achieve near ubiquity in all disciplines. In my role at the Software Sustainability Institute, I have worked with everyone from fusion…
By Simon Hettrick, Deputy Director.
Two weeks ago, we launched a petition to see how many people agreed that software is fundamental to research and, if we overlook this fact, that we lose our ability to make groundbreaking discoveries. How will the petition help make a difference?
The purpose of the petition is to raise awareness of research software. Every person who signs, everyone who retweets and - importantly - everyone who talks about the petition in their groups or offices, helps make more researchers think about their use of software. The more of those people who…