News

Jason Hoyt from PeerJ and Ian Mulvany from eLife are running a "hackathon" event in London on 6th July 2013, to demonstrate the value of the CC-BY licence within academia.

Part of the magic of bringing people together in multi-team projects is the unexpected things that spark off from their work together — often not at all what was planned or expected, but no less worthwhile for that.

The NeISS project brought together creators of social simulation tools with a view to creating an overarching infrastructure with tools and services to look at augmented data, expanding the research possibilities for social scientists across the UK.

If you want to know more about this work, read the NeISS case study (the latest in our series of case studies).

The Technology Strategy Board and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) are to invest up to £1m in feasibility studies to stimulate the development of new multi-disciplinary approaches to software development.

This competition will fund projects that seek to create novel approaches to critical parts of the software development process, such as capturing user requirements and understanding user culture, and the translation of these into proposals for effective business methodologies suitable for small projects and budgets.

For more information, visit the competition website.

The mission of the Foundation for Open Access Statistics (FOAS) is to promote free software, open access publishing, and reproducible research in statistics.

FOAS works to ensure the continued success of the Journal of Statistical Software (JSS), one of the few major open access journals that is free for both readers and authors. They also promote the use and development of free software for statistics, such as the R language and environment for computational statistics. They encourage members and the academic community at large to publish reproducible research that is publicly available online, e.g. in an open-access journal or on an open-access, pre-print server.

You can join FOAS to show your support for free statistical software, open access publishing, and reproducible research in statistics. Membership is free and open to all.

Our work has ensured the long term future of a major website for the arts and humanities community. This global hub has also been extended so that different arts and humanities projects can share information.

If you want to know more about this work, read our the arts-humanities.net case study (the latest in our series of case studies).

To promote the development and release of sustainable and reusable software associated with published research, the SoundSoftware project will be awarding a number of Reproducible Research Prizes. If you have published your software or datasets as part of your audio or music research output, so that other UK researchers can reproduce your results, you could win a prize!

The Collaborations Workshop 2013 provided a range of new ideas and inspirations which all available on our website.

The outcomes of the breakout sessions were logged in a publicly accessible (for read-only) Google Group. The five most important lessons learnt from each of the breakout sessions were collected and published. On the top of that, the delegates suggested 17 recommendations for improvements and 17 pledges were made. The slides from the introductory talks together with the screencasts are available via the main CW13 website. The screencasts from the Lightning Talks can be be viewed online. The best of 19 Collaborative Ideas which the participant came up turned out to be "Low-risk high-impact micro-collaboration". The full list of the Collaborative Ideas together with the notes taken by the teams who worked on them are also available.

The web magazine iSGTW have published an article about its highlights from the EGI Community Forum last week, which included a blog post from the Institute called Don't forget the people - a fractured training landscape.

The RCUK's policy on Open Access came into effect on 1st April 2013. RCUK have recently published revised guidance and answers to frequently asked questions to help researchers and research organisations with implementation of the policy.

Although this policy does not include software, it is an important step towards the transparency and accessibility of scientific research, of which the availability and reusability of software plays a part.