For good research you need tools. Just as the research of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology, would have been impossible without the lenses he made, the tool of research software is indispensable for modern scientific research. Whether it concerns computational text analysis in the humanities, astronomic calculations, or predictive modelling of the spread of Covid-19, research software is the tool that turns data into information.
A group of researchers, data stewards and other data specialists from institutes like DANS, the Netherlands eScience Center and the TU Delft, captured their thoughts around the importance of research software in a position paper that is now available in Zenodo. The paper was the result of an elaborate discussion and review process in which many external specialists participated. Although the paper is in principal addressing the funders of Dutch research and Dutch research institutes, the content is relevant to the international scientific community at large. More on the background and motivation behind the paper can be found in a blog of The Netherlands Research Software Engineer community (NL-RSE), the paper itself is available from the Zenodo repository.
More information
For more information, please contact Cees Hof, one of the co-authors of the paper (in a personal capacity), or Gerry Coen who is coordinating software sustainability activities at DANS.
