Nordic-RSE online unconference 2022 #NordicRSEunconf

What career paths can digital humanities offer to technical people? Let us discuss it together current status, challenges and perspectives.

Sanna Isabel Ulfsparre will give an invited talk about policy, trends and tendencies in the optics of research, in particular with respect to FAIR research principles and open science. While the principles of open science are slowly becoming fundamental in publications and data management, in the future universities and institutions are expected to turn their attention to the production of open software, leading to an increased need of research software engineers. Following her talk, Sanna Isabel would like to lead a discussion / workshop. Matteo will be facilitating the organization of this activity.

Academia is operating on a set of constraints that makes sustained development of durable software particularly challenging, such as limited resources, frequent staff turnover and lack of training. In this presentation, I reflect on the journey of Clinica, a successful neuroimaging software project, which has been in development for 6 years and counting. First born as a side-project used internally at the Aramis Lab, Clinica has become a mature software project developed in the open and fostering a growing community of users. I will share the major lessons we have learnt during this successful journey and touch on various topics such as coding best practices, technical debt and project management. Although Clinica is developed in Python, most takeaways will be transferable to other projects written with a different software stack.

Publications are the currency for researchers and number and distribution of publications can often be a tie-breaker for getting fundings, so let's talk about where to publish research software papers.

A few inputs to start the discussion

• What are the forums that accept research software papers? There are e.g. JOSS, JORS, ACM transactions on mathematical software, do you know others?
• What to publish there? When is a research software "good enough" to be published in a journal?
• How do these journals compare to traditional journals? When should you choose a "traditional" forum and when a software forum, what are the advantages and disadvantages of each?
• How are these journals ranked compared to other ones? Some countries (e.g. Finland and Norway) have a ranking system of publication forums. How are these forums ranked? How should they be ranked?
• Is there enough awareness of these forums? Are all RSEs and researchers aware of these forums and related issues? What can we do to increase awareness (if needed)?

Code written to simulate real physical systems typically needs to provide an ensemble of input parameters to create a valid simulation. Writing logic for model validation is a repetitive and tedious task that needs to be handled with great care when performed manually.

This talk will show how the modern software stack can simplify model validation of a traditional finite element method. With the combination of pydantic, docker, and Fast-API we can even make Fortran77 sexy again.