A new initiative has been launched to help Research Software Engineers (RSEs) stay connected while many national RSE conferences have been cancelled due to COVID-19.
EPSRC will be inviting applications for outline proposals for Research Software Engineer Fellowships from 30 June.
A report looks at the career paths and prospects of people working in academic data science in the US.
By Yo Yehudi, Mateusz Kuzak, and Emmy Tsang. Research software engineers are evaluated like other researchers, largely based on the numbers of publications and citations. However, metrics based on the number of publications encourage re-creating ‘new’ things or re-implementations instead of reuse, and there are huge variations in existing practices to cite software, meaning software isn't always cited or citations aren’t always captured.
The complexity and difficulty of installing scientific software can often hamper its uptake and use within research communities. Douglas Lowe, a Research Software Engineer in Research IT, has been working with Dr Eric Prestat from the School of Natural Sciences to solve this problem for Prismatic, a cross-platform research software toolkit.
By Diego Alonso Alvarez, Senior Research Software Engineer, Imperial College London