Research Software Alliance
Research software: recognised and valued as a fundamental and vital component of research worldwide
Our mission
To bring research software communities together to collaborate on the advancement of research software.
How we can help
Research
Enable better and more efficient research
Skills
Promote skills training and expertise sharing
Policy
Support policies that recognise and value research software
Why ReSA?
Software is pervasive in modern research, enabling the generation, analysis and/or presentation of research outputs. Research software is a key driver of innovation and the economy. ReSA focuses on software that is developed to serve a research purpose, rather than the standard software that some researchers also use for research purposes.
While software has started to be recognised internationally as a key part of facilitating trusted, reproducible research outputs and open science, recognition of research software as a valuable research input and output has lagged behind that of research data.
A lot still needs to be done to influence culture change towards research software across a broad spectrum of stakeholders, including researchers, institutions, funders, and publishers, and to develop and promote standards for developing research software that meets the needs of reliable, reproducible, and reusable research.
Why it matters
Software matters
A UK survey of 1,000 randomly chosen researchers showed that more than 90% of researchers acknowledged software as being important for their own research, and about 70% of researchers said that their research would not be possible without software [1]. A study of Nature papers from Jan-March 2016 reveals that “32 of the 40 papers examined mention software, and the 32 papers contain 211 mentions of distinct pieces of software, for an average of 6.5 mentions per paper.”[2].
1 Hettrick. S. J., et al. (2014). UK Research Software Survey 2014 [Data set]. doi:10.5281/zenodo.14809
2 Nangia, Udit; Katz, Daniel S. (2017): Understanding Software in Research: Initial Results from Examining Nature and a Call for Collaboration. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.06527
