Simon Hettrick
Professor Simon Hettrick is Deputy Director of the Software Sustainability Institute, and a Director of the Southampton Research Software Group.
By Simon Hettrick
Deputy Director, Software Sustainability Institute
What! We have to worry about software now?
6 November 2018 - ESRC Festival @sjh5000 ORCID: 0000-0002-6809-5195
I'm not a social scientist
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
My skills
Laser
physics
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
"How many researchers rely on software?"
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
My skills
Laser
physics
Social
science
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
"How many researchers rely on software?"
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
Use
software
Fundamental to
results
Develop own code
69%
92%
56%
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
Percentage of cross-council funding into software-reliant research
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
Software in publications
65%
31 UK institutions ~ 600k papers
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
Software is rapidly becoming a fundamental research tool
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
All good so far...
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
of researchers who develop
code have no training
24%
of group leaders looking to commercialise code would not feel comfortable sharing their code
50%
REF 2014 publication submissions
>15,000
REF 2014 software submissions
58
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
You can't have reliable results without reliable software
You can't reproduce results without access to software
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
Researchers can't afford to care while research incentives are against them
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
What's the situation in social science?
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
Percentage of ESRC funding into
software-reliant research
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
Why?
-
Data deluge
-
More use of data not designed for social science
-
Lots of data cleaning and data alignment problems
-
More software techniques, machine-learning, automated data collection, etc
-
Lots of Excel, Stata and SPSS, less OpenRefine, R and Python
-
Training in the traditional tools, but little more advanced training
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
What do we
need to do?
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
Incentivise good software practices
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
Incentives
-
Submit software to REF2021!
-
Better assessment of grants that include software development
-
Connecting research outputs to grants that include software development
-
Software management plans
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
Make training available
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
Growth of carpentry workshops in the UK
Data Carpentry for social science: http://bit.ly/2PeMOda
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
Make skills
available
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
RSE Groups at
20 organisations
bit.ly/RSEGroupsInUK
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
www.rse.ac.uk
Software use is only going to increase
And this is a good thing!
Expect more pressure to adapt research practices
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
Studies
- Software survey:
https://www.software.ac.uk/blog/2017-09-06-journey-reproducibility-excel-pandas
- Grants data analysis:
https://github.com/softwaresaved/software_in_grants_GTR
- Publication analysis coming soon
Contact
s.hettrick@software.ac.uk
@sjh5000
ORCID: 0000-0002-6809-5195
Licence
© Simon Hettrick
These slides are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Thanks
Peter Smyth and Aleksandra Nenadic
These slides: bit.ly/2PF6FS8
What! We have to worry about software now?
By Simon Hettrick
What! We have to worry about software now?
Presentation on software prevalence in research and discussion of barriers and incentives
