Welcome to the October 2025 newsletter for the research software community at The University of Sheffield, featuring news, opportunities, events and training for you.
Open Science boosts citation rates in France Ouvrir la Science released a national-scale study showing that Open Science practices (like sharing preprints, data, and software) are positively correlated with citation counts.
Policy Principles for Using GenAI in Research and Innovation The University has published Policy Principles for Using GenAI in Research and Innovation as part of the Good Research and Innovation Practices (GRIP) of the University.
SciX Launches SciXplorer has launched as a new platform to explore research across Earth, environmental, and space sciences.
Sheffield ReproducibiliTea Journal Club 21st October, Room 12.1.01 (Level 1) of the Charles Street Building (Sheffield Hallam University). Dr Ester Ehiyazaryan-White, Senior Lecturer in Childhood Studies will go through the paper The Conundrum of Sharing Research Data and lead discussion.
The 2nd Best Practices in AI event is confirmed on the 11th November 12:00-17:00 The afternoon will consist of talks and walkthroughs on best practices for research, design, development, and deployment of AI. It will focus on practical aspects such as tooling, optimisation, profiling, tips and tricks to supercharge AI in your research!
Collaborations Workshop 2026 (CW26) 28–30 April 2026, ICC Belfast Hybrid event on “Strengthening the Research Software Community” run by the Software Sustainability Institute.
7th Annual UK HPC & AI Conference 14–15 October 2025, Leicester Focused on “Trustworthy Compute”, featuring talks on AI safety, sustainable infrastructure, and more.
ReproducibiliTea Webinars 15–16 October 2025 Two sessions exploring peer review and its diversification.
Telling Our Success Stories: Recognising Contributions in Research Software - Software Sunstainability Institute Recognising and supporting contributions to research software is an ongoing challenge across disciplines.
Code That Works Isn’t Always Code That Lasts - Software Sunstainability Institute A reflection on sustainable software practices from SSI’s CW team.
N8 CIR Summer 2025 Internships On Friday 12 September, many of our summer interns came together at The National Centre for Early Music in York to showcase their work.
Migrating to Positron from VS Code This document outlines how to migrate from VS Code to Positron, a data science-focused editor built on Code OSS.
White Paper: The Challenges and Prospects of the Intersection of Humanities and Data Science Exploring interdisciplinary collaboration between humanities and data science to advance research and best practices.
How Scientists Use Large Language Models to Program Examining how scientists use code-generating AI models and their impact on research software practices.
METR Study: Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower.
Bring Your Own Classroom – with The Code Refinery The Code Refinery has been training researchers on how to write better software since 2016. In this episode Samantha Wittke, Richard Darst and Radovan Bast tell us how it all started, how CodeRefinery is run and what’s in store for the future.
Meet the 2025 SSI Fellows Better Software - Better Research! This is the mission of the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) since 2010. To support this, the SSI has been running a fellowship programme. In this episode you’ll hear from 3 different fellows from the 2025 cohort about their motivation and plans for their fellowship. —
DisCouRSE Flexible Fund (Round 1) (Closes 14th November) Funding for community-led projects to build leadership and connections across digital research technical roles. Volunteer to review applications here.
dRTP Skills Funding Opportunities (Opens soon) Support for Research Technical Professionals developing digital research skills.
Access to High Performance Computing Facilities (Autumn 2025) (Closes 6th November) Apply for computational support across the UKRI remit.
AI for Environmental Science Phase One (Closes 11th December) UKRI funding call for innovative uses of AI and data science in environmental research.
Paid opportunities to contribute to guides on AI, Green Computing, and EDI (£600 for writing, £210 for reviewing).
SSI DisCouRSE Network+ £10k Fund (Closes 14th November) Funding for projects fostering leadership and collaboration among digital research professionals.
Open Research Manager – University of Sheffield (Closes 22nd October) Working across the University and nationally with the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN), you will support projects to accelerate open research practices, embed an open research culture, and enhance research transparency, reliability, and reproducibility.
AI Research Engineer / Senior AI Research Engineer – CMI, Sheffield (Closes 22nd October) You will join the AI Research Engineering team within the University of Sheffield’s Centre for Machine Intelligence, supporting the UKRI-EPSRC funded UK Open Multimodal AI Network’s flagship Open Multimodal AI Benchmark (OMAIB) initiative. OMAIB develops open, community-driven datasets, evaluation protocols, baseline models, and deployment-centric tasks to accelerate multimodal AI solutions for Tomorrow’s Engineering Research Challenges.
Research Software Engineer Assistant – Durham University (Closes 12th October)
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 here to stay informed.
The next meeting is scheduled for 2pm on Wednesday 2025-10-15.
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 Norbert if you would like to share what you know at an upcoming session!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
For queries relating to collaborating with the RSE team on projects: rse@sheffield.ac.uk
Information and access to Bede.
Join our mailing list so as to be notified when we advertise talks and workshops by subscribing to this Google Group.
Queries regarding free research computing support/guidance should be raised via our Code clinic or directed to the University IT helpdesk.