Software Sustainability Institute Software Sustainability: Issues, Challenges and Initiatives Neil Chue Hong, EPCC Seminar, Edinburgh, 29 th July Where indicated slides licensed under Supported byProject funding from

Software Sustainability Institute The Software Sustainability Institute A national facility for cultivating better, more sustainable, research software to enable world- class research Software reaches boundaries in its development cycle that prevent improvement, growth and adoption Providing the expertise and services needed to negotiate to the next stage Developing the policy and tools to support the community developing and using research software Supported by EPSRC Grant EP/H043160/1, and EPSRC/ESRC/BBSRC grant EP/N006410/1

Software Policy Training Community Outreach Delivering essential software skills to researchers via CDTs, institutions & doctoral schools Helping the community to develop software that meets the needs of reliable, reproducible, and reusable research Collecting evidence on the community’s software use & sharing with stakeholders Bringing together the right people to understand and address topical issues Exploiting our platform to enable engagement, delivery & uptake

Website & blog Campaigns Advice Guides Courses Workshops Fellowship Research Software Policy Training Community Consultancy 50+ projects 130+ evaluations 4 surgeries 35+ UK SWC workshops learners 80+ guides 50,000 readers 61 domain ambassadors 20+ workshops organised 740 researchers 50,000 grants analysed 150+ contributed articles 20,000 unique visitors per month 3,000 Twitter followers 300+ RSEs engaged2100 signatures 13 issues highlighted Outreach

Software Sustainability Institute Software isn’t special, it’s mainstream 69% 92% Survey of researchers from 15 Russell Group unis conducted by SSI between Aug- Oct respondents covering representative range of funders, discipline and seniority. researchers

Software Sustainability Institute And everyone’s a developer Survey of researchers from 15 Russell Group unis conducted by SSI between Aug- Oct respondents covering representative range of funders, discipline and seniority. researchers 56%

Software Sustainability Institute So what’s the issue? Survey of researchers from 15 Russell Group unis conducted by SSI between Aug - Oct respondents covering representative range of funders, discipline and seniority. Analysis of data from 49,650 grant titles and abstracts published on Gateway to Research covering Analysis of 10,005 job adverts posted to jobs.ac.uk in 1H % 4% Of UK researchers have had no formal software development training Of jobs advertised in UK universities were software related 77% Of PIs had not included costs for software development in bids (20% deliberately) 30% Of UK research investment has been spent on research which relies on software (£840m in 2013/14, rising 3% a year) … and then there are gender related issues

Software Sustainability Institute Software Credit How do you get credit for producing software?  Roles e.g. Project Credit  Mechanisms Software papers e.g. JORS, SoftwareX Software citation e.g. Software Citation Working Group  Tools Researcher Identifiers e.g. ORCID Alt-Metrics e.g. ImpactStory  Workshop at Natural History Museum 19 th October

Software Sustainability Institute Campaigning for careers software.ac.uk/policy

Software Sustainability Institute Career Paths in UK Careers outside academic sector Non-university Research (industry, government etc.) ProfessorPermanent Research Staff Early Career Research PhD students Source: The Scientific Century, Royal Society, 2010 (revised to reflect first stage clarification from “What Do PhD’s Do?” study) UK STEM graduate career paths

Software Sustainability Institute Research Software Engineer Join the RSE community at Network for RSE group leaders being formed

Teach basic lab skills for scientific computing so that researchers can do more in less time and with less pain. Teach basic concepts, skills and tools for working more effectively with data. Workshops are designed for people with little to no prior computational experience. Open source learning, that can be tailored to disciplines. “Train the trainers”: building a capable base of instructors.

Pyramid of skills Data + spreadsheets + some statistics and…? Some knowledge of scripting, using workflow tools, command line Good knowledge of programming (R, Python or other), structured data, metadata, proficiency in building workflows and automating tasks Multiple disciplines bioinformatics ecology genomics sociology digital humanities neuroscience geosciences …. Different levels of career PhD students postdoctoral researchers research assistants researchers in industry …. SKILLS Full computational lab skillset Slide courtesy of Aleksandra Pawlik, Data Carpentry

Software Sustainability Institute Creating Policy Research Software Engineers  Initial concept at Collaborations Workshop 2012  EPSRC piloting Fellowships in 2015 Software Management Plans  Discussed in 2011  Piloted on EPSRC and ESRC calls in  Software accreditation work starting soon Software Licensing  Piloting with Wellcome Trust, through workshops Women in Software  Blog series and supporting work of other groups What should be next?

Software Sustainability Institute Find out more about the SSI Community Engagement (Lead: Shoaib Sufi)  Fellowship Programme Fellowship Programme  Events and Workshops Events and Workshops Consultancy (Lead: Steve Crouch)  Open Call for Projects / Collaborations Open Call for ProjectsCollaborations  Software Evaluation Software Evaluation Policy and Publicity (Lead: Simon Hettrick)  Case Studies / Policy Campaigns Case StudiesPolicy Campaigns  Software and Research Blog Software and Research Blog Training (Lead: Aleksandra Pawlik)  Software Carpentry (300+ students/year) Software Carpentry  Guides and Top Tips GuidesTop Tips Journal of Open Research Software (Editor: Neil Chue Hong) Journal of Open Research Software Collaboration between universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford and Southampton Supported by EPSRC Grant EP/H043160/1, and EPSRC/ESRC/BBSRC grant EP/N006410/1