May 2025 Newsletter

The University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering Community Newsletter May 2025

Welcome to the May 2025 newsletter for the research software community at The University of Sheffield, featuring news, opportunities, events and training for you.

Events

Upcoming External Events

• Now Open: SSI - Software Maintenance Fund - Round 1 (7th April - 30th May)
  • They will also be running an information webinar on the 7th May 2025, 13:00-14:00 BST, covering Eligibility and Evaluation criteria, and answering questions from the audience.
• USRSE25 in Philedelphia, PA - 6-8 October 2025
  • Submit your talk, paper, computational notebook, workshop, or birds of a feather session by 16th May 2025

• HPC RSE Special Interest Group Online Meetup - 19 May 2025, 11:00-13:00 BST

• CCP-AHC (“Toward a new Collaborative Computational Project for Arts, Humanities, and Culture research”) Town Hall 2025, Durham - 22nd May 2025

• EPSRC update: a community forum with our Executive Board - 22nd May 2025, 14:00-15:30 BST

• RSECon25: University of Warwick, Coventry - 9-11th September 2025
  • Registration now open
  • Applications for bursaries to attend are also open - Closes: 06 July 2025

Articles, Blogs, Papers & Podcasts

Surveys

• HPC Training Landscape in Europe Survey

Blogs/Podcasts

• Which programming language should I use? A guide for early-career researchers

• Code for Thought EN: From Volcanos to Open Source - John Stevenson

• Code for Thought EN: From Research to Production? With Duncan McGregor

Papers

• Awareness of FAIR and FAIR4RS among international research software funders

• Learning and teaching biological data science in the Bioconductor community

• Pre-Print: Scientific Open-Source Software Is Less Likely to Become Abandoned Than One Might Think! Lessons from Curating a Catalog of Maintained Scientific Software

• Pre-Print: CODE beyond FAIR

Research Software Practice

• Univeristy of Sheffiled Library and Research, Partnerships and Innovation teams publish new guidance on using the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) to credit research-enabling staff for their contributions to research.

Opportunities

• Access to high performance computing facilities: Spring 2025 - Closes: 22nd May

• University of Sheffield Open Research Prize 2025 - Closes: 28th May 2025

• DARE UK next-generation trusted research environment capabilities - Closes: 5th June 2025

• Call for Flexible Fund reviewers: Join our Opportunity Review Panel - Closes: 6 June 2025

• Feedback being requested on the draft of the new UKRI data policy (including code and software) and webinar - Closes: 9 July 2025

Training

For more forthcoming RSE training events, keep an eye on our Training page and join our mailing list to hear about new events.

Jobs

Check for advertised RSE and RSE-adjacent roles at the RSE society’s vacancies board.

Community

Digital Research Practice Support Community

The DRPS community is a group for people that support researchers in carrying out research in the digital age. Meetings are held monthly, with discussions around events, training and opportunities related to the field. You can join the google group to stay informed. Next meeting: Wednesday 21st May 2025 at 2pm.

LunchBytes

LunchBytes are short talks from the research community on research software, data, and infrastructure.

More information on future LunchBytes will be coming out over the coming months, so sign up to the RSE mailing list if you’d like to learn more about research software and associated practices, or get in contact with Farhad if you would like to share what you know at an upcoming session!

Support

Code Clinics

Why not come to a Code Clinic? We’re keen to help you.

Code Clinics are fortnightly supported sessions run by the RSE team and IT Services’ Research IT team. They are open to anyone at TUoS writing code for research to get help with programming problems and general advice on best practices.

At each session, members of the RSE and/or Research IT teams will be available to review code, advise, troubleshoot, and suggest ways to improve your computational workflows.

Research IT HPC Drop In

HPC Drop-In sessions are providing assistance with HPC related user issues such as challenges in scaling an application from desktop to supercomputer. We are considering extending the number of our sessions to two or three weekly. These interactive sessions could provide a better interface with our users than our non-interactive ticketing system. These sessions are advertised on the HPC mailing list.

Research IT Consultations

Alongside the HPC Drop-In sessions, Research IT are also running one to one consultations to solve in depth user specific problems. These consultations can be booked via our webpage. If you are interested please visit the following link: https://students.sheffield.ac.uk/it-services/research.

Sheffield RSE Team

The Sheffield RSE Team aims to collaborate with you to help improve your research software. They can provide dedicated staff to ensure that you can deliver excellent research software engineering on your research projects.

Research IT

Research IT directly supports research, both academic and commercial. We provide large scale HPC systems, advice on everything from statistics to ML to data pipelines and training for both students and staff.

Working with academics, our staff are embedded within research groups on both long and short term engagements.