Posted by n.chuehong on 8 September 2015 - 2:50pm

By Shoaib Sufi, Community Lead

Traditionally August is the holiday season here in the UK, but many good things can start or progress in a quiet period; especially exciting was the opening of the application period for the Institute’s 2016 Fellowship programme. Read on to find out what else happened in August.

Fellows 2016

Applications opened in late August for the Fellows 2016 intake. Closing date is 1st of October at 11pm BST.

We are looking for candidates who use, develop or advocate for better software in the research process. Are you someone involved in research software? Perhaps you use it heavily, develop it for yourself and others, or just love advocating for it as part of better practice. If you are passionate about research software you should consider applying. It gives you a chance to network with like-minded people, have your plans assessed, and the ability to ask for help from the Institute and the wider Fellows network and their contacts.

Please take see the launch announcement and feel free to distribute information about this widely.

Cambridge Licensing workshop

This takes place at The Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge from 11am to 3pm on Monday 14 September, and places are still available. You will get a chance to hear about which licenses to use and ways to meet funders’ requirements for data sharing. With over 30 people registered and counting - a mix of Cambridge and non-Cambridge folk attending - this is set to be an excellent meeting that you are sure to learn something from.

For more information and a link to registration check our news item.

Software Credit Workshop

Citation and credit are both hot topics and increasingly so for software.

The Institute’s Software Credit Workshop takes place at the Natural History Museum, London on Monday 19th October. The workshop will cover best practice, future thinking and practical steps to help link the use of software in research with reputational credit and career paths for those involved in its production.

Registration will be opening soon so keep an eye on the workshop page; we currently have over 40 people expressing interest to attend so this is set to be a dynamic workshop.

We’re also pleased to welcome two new members to the workshop’s steering committee, Liz Allen (independent consultant, formerly Head of Evaluation at Wellcome) and Kaitlin Thaney (Director of Mozilla Science Lab), whose wisdom and experience will help make the workshop even better.

Blog and news from the community

Institute Fellow Robin Wilson presented his work on ReciPy, a tool that allows you to do "Effortless provenance tracking in Python using just one line!". The Institute is very pleased with the development of ReciPy, as it started life as the Institute’s Collaborations Workshop 2015 (CW15)  as the winner of the CW15 Hackday. If you are into using Python to help you produce figures ReciPy might be just the ticket to help you track your inputs, a great aid to provenance and reproducibility!

Fellow Alexandra Simperler of the NSCCS at Imperial College and Katalin Phimister, computational chemist, published an ideas piece on changing the way software skills should be taught. They not only covered the idea of giving users a better understanding of what was happening under the hood but also made an open call out for comments on people’s views. So if you have some thoughts in this space this article is well worth a read and comment.

Final words

All in all a busy month, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions about the updates this month please feel free to get in touch.