Submissions are invited to a UCL internal call for proposals for research software development.

We will be providing a termly call for free software development effort in line with UCL’s research priorities, and the first such call is now open. Proposals will be reviewed by our academic governing bodies, which are staffed by leading UCL computational academics. Proposals should be submitted by 14th February, emailed to rc-softdev@ucl.ac.uk following this guidance. Each supported project will be provided with 50% FTE for three months from April to June 2013. Key staff from submitting groups should be available in the period 21 Feb-7 March for discussions. A similar call will be issued in April for effort in the third quarter.

In addition to this cost-free provision, research teams preparing grants involving software development should consider involving the team as collaborators, costing programming effort from our developers into the grant – we can provide fractional or full time effort as needed, throughout the project or at critical intervals. Please get in touch to discuss details of costs and processes, by emailing rc-softdev@ucl.ac.uk.

As part of the “Research Programming in Practice” seminar series, Brian Hole , founder of Ubiquity Press and creator of the Journal of Open Research Software will be speaking about a thorny problem for computationally-focused researchers: how do you best build a publication record and enhance your academic reputation when your primary output as a researcher is software?

The Journal of Open Research Software is one potential solution, associating a software entity with a peer-reviewed journal publication. (Disclosure: I’m on the Editorial Board of JORS)

This will be an exciting event, and I’m sure there will be plenty of discussion about this difficult issue for computational researchers.

The seminar takes place on Tuesday 12th February, at 10am, in the B15 Lecture Theatre in the Darwin Building.