SSI Director Neil Chue Hong, Project Officer Giacomo Peru, and Project Manager Kirsty Pringle will participate in the European EVERSE project representing EPCC and the University of Edinburgh. The project will start in spring 2024 and run for 36 months with 18 partners across 10 countries.

Coordinated by the Institute of Applied Biosciences (INAB) of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, (CERTH), the European EVERSE project aims to create a framework for research software and code excellence, collaboratively designed and championed by the research communities across the five EOSC Science Clusters and national Research Software Expertise Centres, in pursuit of building a European Network of Research Software Quality and setting the foundations of a future Virtual Institute for Research Software Excellence.

Building on its leadership of the SSI and work in FAIR-IMPACT on software metrics and metadata, the team at EPCC will focus on developing and implementing processes and tools that support the assessment and verification of code quality, based on established best practices and standards across scientific communities, as well as building a collaborative community for evaluating, verifying, and improving the quality of scientific software and code, and collecting and consolidating best practices and standards from across scientific communities on research software.

The project aims to cross-fertilise different research domains, act as a lobbying organisation, and raise awareness of software as a key enabler in research, with the overall ambition to accelerate research and innovation through improving the quality of research software and code. EVERSE’s ultimate ambition is to contribute towards a cultural change where research software is recognized as a first-class citizen of the scientific process, and the people contributing to it are credited for their efforts. 

For more details on the EVERSE project, please read the full press release or get in touch with the Project Coordinator, Fotis Psomopoulos. For more details on the University of Edinburgh’s role in EVERSE, please contact Prof. Neil Chue Hong.

A community meetup will take place between Tuesday 16 and Wednesday 17 January 2024 to bring together those whose research attention is directed towards RSE Research and prepare the ground for an international in-person symposium on RSE Research.

According to Toward Research Software Engineering Research “RSE Research aims to improve the scholarly understanding of research software development, and to develop methods, techniques and tools to improve RSE practice. Therefore, RSE research has to tackle a number of research questions, which do not only address the software as a product, but also software development assistance for the domain researcher”.

Those interested in contributing to the community meetup with a short talk should send a title and a short abstract to IRSER-community@googlegroups.com by 30 November 2023.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Research software artefacts;
• Research software engineering methods;
• The research and professional environment in which research software engineers act;
• Empirical research on RSE (e.g. experiments, case studies and action research, see Empirical Standards for Software Engineering Research).