Location: Mövenpick Hotel Amsterdam City Centre, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Date: 1-day workshop during IEEE eScience 2018 conference, October 29, 2018

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Progress in scientific research is dependent on the quality and accessibility of research software at all levels. It is critical to address many new challenges related to the development, deployment, maintenance, and sustainability of open-use research software: the software upon which specific research results rely.  Open-use software means that the software is widely accessible (whether open source, shareware, or commercial). Research software means that the choice of software is essential to specific research results; using different software could produce different results.

In addition, it is essential that scientists, researchers, and students are able to learn and adopt a new set of software-related skills and methodologies. Established researchers are already acquiring some of these skills, and in particular, a specialized class of software developers is emerging in academic environments who are an integral and embedded part of successful research teams. WSSSPE provides a forum for discussion of these challenges, including both positions and experiences, and a forum for the community to assemble and act.

WSSSPE is an international community-driven organization that promotes sustainable research software by addressing challenges related to the full lifecycle of research software through shared learning and community action. WSSSPE6.1 is the ninth workshop convened since 2013 in an international series that provides opportunities for the community to come together to share and advance practices.

WSSSPE6.1 aims to facilitate the creation of a regional community focussed on sustainable research software, by sharing and building best practice both locally and internationally. The workshop will discuss topics relevant to building a sustainable future for open-use research software and the activities that are needed to get there.  This includes discussion of practices and experiences in sustainable scientific software, with the goal of improving the quality of today’s research software and the experiences of its developers by sharing practices and experiences.  

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Software engineering of/for scientific software
    • Best practices for engineering sustainable software, such as design, development, and testing issues
    • Refactoring/improving legacy scientific software
    • Engineering design for sustainable software
    • Adaptation of mainstream software-engineering practices for scientific software
    • Software tools that aid sustainability
  • Software publishing
    • Journals and alternative venues for publishing scientific software
    • Review processes for published scientific software
    • Software discoverability/reuse
  • Software reproducibility
    • Requirements for reproducibility in conferences and journals
    • Best practices for reproducibility in scientific software
  • Community, community building and collaborations
    • Models for funding specialist expertise in software collaborations
    • Academia/industry interaction and collaborations
    • Case studies of building regional WSSSPE communities, a.k.a. Research Software Engineers (RSE) Associations
    • Metrics for the success of scientific software
  • Professionalism
    • Career paths
    • Research Software Engineering as a career brand
    • Initiatives for professionalization of Research Software Engineering
    • Incentives in publishing, funding and promotion for better scientific software
  • Training
    • Training for developing scientific software
    • Curriculum for software sustainability
  • Credit
    • Making the existing credit and citation ecosystem work better for software
    • Future credit and citation ecosystems
    • Software contributions as a part of tenure review
    • Case studies of receiving credit for software contributions
    • Awards and recognition that encourage sustainable software

Important Dates:

  • Submission of papers/posters: July 11, 2018
  • Decisions announced (sending notification emails): August 18, 2018
  • WSSSPE6.1: 1-day workshop during IEEE eScience 2018 conference, October 29, 2018

Submission types and formats:

  • Lightning talks, short/position/idea papers: up to 2 pages, that if accepted can be presented in a 5 to 7 minute talk.
  • Full paper: a long paper, up to 10 pages, that can be presented in a 20-minute talk.
  • Posters (will NOT be published in the proceedings): Posters can be up to A0 in size and will be displayed as part of the RSE networking session. Posters may be submitted covering any of the above topic areas. We especially welcome Research Software Engineering (RSE) group and community posters describing the structure/focus of an institutional RSE group or team, or a local or national RSE community. Please note that posters will not be published in the proceedings. The posters are intended to stimulate discussion, support the development of new collaborations and help to provide opportunities for attendees to find out more about the different work that is going on within the WSSSPE community. RSE group and community posters provide an opportunity to showcase the wide-ranging profiles and structures of RSE groups setup at many institutions and to help develop awareness of and links between these groups. A 1-paragraph abstract should be submitted describing the proposed poster content and its relevance to the WSSSPE community. Posters will be displayed as part of the RSE networking session. Poster presenters will get a 1-minute lightning talk slot to present their poster at the start of the poster session.

We also welcome “experience” papers in both short and full paper formats. Both types of talks may be based on novel or previously-published work. We also welcome position papers on what we can do to improve the state of sustainable scientific software, or discuss experiences in sustainable scientific software, specifically discussing current practices and experiences and how they have been used to improve the quality of today’s research software and/or the experiences of its developers.

Submission process:

Authors are invited to submit their papers using the IEEE 8.5 × 11 manuscript guidelines: double-column text using single-spaced 10 point font on 8.5 × 11 inch pages. Templates are available from https://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html.

RSE community posters should be up to A0 in size.

Submissions should be made via https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wssspe201861

The proceedings of WSSSPE6.1 will be included in the eScience 2018 proceedings to be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press, and will be made available online through the IEEExplore Digital Library.

Authors are requested to publish a pre-print of their work to an open repository such as arXiv, figshare or zenodo, and to inform the workshop of the URL of this pre-print. We will link from the conference website to the preprint files.

For each paper selected for publication, at least one of the authors must hold a registration for the workshop, and must present the paper in person. WSSSPE and IEEE reserve the right to exclude a paper from distribution after the conference, including IEEE Xplore® Digital Library, if the paper is not presented by the author at the conference.

Preliminary Agenda

  • 09:00-12:30
    • Session 1 (1 hour) – Facilitated session to meet and greet, to build community
    • Session 2 (2.5 hours) – Lightning talks and full papers
  • 12:30-13:30 Lunch
  • 13:30-17:00
    • Session 3 (1 hour) – Workshop addressing a specific theme (TBD)
    • Session 4 (1 hour) – Lightning talks and full papers (continued)
    • Session 5 (1.5 hours):
      • RSE poster lightning talks followed by community discussion on next steps and poster session providing an opportunity to network with other attendees.
      • Panel discussion: Developing sustainable research software communities – interactive discussion with an invited panel of four leading community figures