Simon Hettrick
Professor Simon Hettrick is Deputy Director of the Software Sustainability Institute, and a Director of the Southampton Research Software Group.
The Software
Sustainability Institute
28 October 2019 - OECD Digital Skills Workshop @sjh5000 ORCID: 0000-0002-6809-5195
By Simon Hettrick
Software is vital
to research
These slides: http://bit.ly/32WOdYA
Use
software
Fundamental to
results
Develop own code
69%
92%
56%
Percentage of cross-council funding in software-reliant research
Software in publications
65%
31 UK institutions ~ 600k papers
Data is meaningless without the software needed to interpret it
-
You can't have reliable results without reliable software
-
You can't reproduce results without access to the software
Some new tenets for modern research
Software's role in academia
These slides: http://bit.ly/32WOdYA
-
No incentives
-
Little funding
-
Limited access to skills
Incentives
publications
REF 2014 publication submissions
>15,000
REF 2014 software submissions
58
Funding
£2 billion
£20 million
Software-reliant research
Software communities
and support
Skills
"Professional"
"Beginner"
-
You can't have reliable results without reliable software
-
You can't reproduce results without access to the software
-
You can't afford to care about software if incentives are against you
-
You can't afford to care about software
-
You can't expect researchers to have the skills to develop software
Some new tenets for modern research
Better software
Better research
These slides: http://bit.ly/32WOdYA
The real mission
is to change
academic culture
"Oh come on! How big can this Goliath guy be?"
Software
Training
Community
Policy
Providing expertise
Growing a training community
Writing guides
Collecting evidence
Lobbying funders and academic stakeholders
Increasing recognition of software across all domains
Collecting intelligence from domain experts
Outreach
Scaling up everything else
Supporting the people who write the software:
Research Software Engineers
...but more on that later
These slides: http://bit.ly/32WOdYA
Summary
- Software is vital to research
- Supporting software requires a change to academic culture - esp. incentives, funding and skill provision
- To enact culture change, the SSI works over a range of activities that simultaneously target different stakeholders
- A good proxy for the demand for change is the rapid growth of the Research Software Engineer community
Thank you!
@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/
These slides: http://bit.ly/32WOdYA
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
-
Southampton survey:
https://github.com/Southampton-RSG/soton_software_survey_analysis_2019/blob/master/report/Results%20of%20University%20of%20Southampton%20software%20survey%20June%202019.pdf
Picture credits
- Pillar: KissCC0
- Scales: Clipart Library
- Goliath cartoon: Cartoonstock
Who writes
the software?
No formal role for software developers in UK academia (in 2010)
Postdoc ~ 40%
...according to the 2017 RSE survey in the UK
Research
Software
Engineering
Research
Software
Engineer
RSE Groups at
28 organisations
bit.ly/RSEGroupsInUK
www.society-rse.org
SSI Digital Skills at OECD workshop
By Simon Hettrick
SSI Digital Skills at OECD workshop
Short talk to introduce the SSI and RSEs at the OECD workshop on digital skills.
