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