Conferences on research software sustainability

2017 looks set to be a great year for advancing understanding of the importance of research software sustainability. There is increasing recognition of the crucial role of software in achieving significant advances in research, and researchers' reliance on software - a 2014 analysis of Nature’s top 100 most cited papers concluded that: “the vast majority describe experimental methods or software that have become essential in their fields.”

This reflected in the wealth of relevant upcoming workshops, which include:

• SIAM Conference of Computation Science and Engineering includes Software Productivity and Sustainability for CSE and Data Science, 1 March, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Collaborations Workshop 2017, 27-29 March, Leeds, UK
• RDA Plenary includes a Software Source Code focus group, 5-7 April, Barcelona
• Science Gateways Bootcamp, 24-28 April, Indianapolis, USA
• Software and Services for Science, 10-11 May, Hannover, Germany
• International Workshop on Science Gateways, 18-21 June, Poznam, Poland
• Gateways 2017, 23-25 October, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
• Force 2017, 25-27 October, Berlin, Germany

One of the best workshops I went to last year was on Software Development Best Practice, brilliantly led by Rafael C. Jimenez (ELIXIR) and Jason Williams (Cyverse). It was a great opportunity to gain an overview of best practices in the field, and to identify an appropriate model for EMBL-ABR, and it was also a very valuable discussion on applying open source principles for research software. As per their upcoming (very collaboratively authored) article in F1000Research journal on the application of Open Source principles for research software, “Software best practices promote better software, and better software improves the reproducibility and reusability of research.”

I look forward to meeting some of you at these great conferences, and continuing to advance software sustainability initiatives.