Welcome to the July 2026 newsletter for the research software community at The University of Sheffield, featuring news, opportunities, events and training for you.
Bots are scraping open data — how should researchers respond? - The snowballing ability of artificial intelligence to trawl open data sets has some scientists worried about losing control of their information.
Checklist for Reusable Code - Reusable code is well-documented, human-readable, portable, organized, and version-controlled. Use this quick checklist for a fast self-check when sharing code for your project.
Research Security and Open Science: The Odd Couple - The Ethical Data Initiative
How hidden contributions power modern research - The people who work behind the scenes to keep research moving say that there should be more recognition for their roles.
Who Will Keep Research Data Infrastructure Open and Running? - The scientific community must consider the longevity of open research infrastructure—why it might fail and how to prevent it.
Inclusivity and Accessibility in Recruitment - Software Sustainability Institute
ConveRSE at Collaborations Workshop 2026 - Software Sustainability Institute
Podcast: When Bits Rot - with C McKean, L Talboom, A Page-Mitchell - Floppy disks, hard drives, CDs, DVDs, SSD drives - no matter what you choose to store your data on - ultimately they all decay.
Podcast: What happened to agile development? - A review with Dave Thomas - Code for Thought
Podcast: ByteSized: Security by Design - Secure Data Principles for Digital Research
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 15th August 2026.
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.
List of archived pages: Archive.