🔍 We are happy to announce that the 2026 International RSE Survey is now open for submissions. The survey will close on Friday 20 March, and can be completed in English, French, German or Spanish.
The RSE Survey produces an incredibly valuable trove of data that anyone can use to understand the RSE community, including national associations, funders, and policymakers.
Find out more about the survey and how to participate at https://www.software.ac.uk/news/2026-international-rse-survey
📣📣📣We're launching a dedicated Research Software submission route in partnership with @joss 🎉
If you have research software ready for publication, you can now submit it to JOSS as part of RSECon26. Accepted JOSS papers (or paper that passed pre-review) will feature both JOSS and RSECon26 branding + receive a 15-minute presentation slot at the conference.
More info → https://tinyurl.com/rsecon26joss (while we wait for the website)
Research Software Papers @RSECon26 1-Rationale As part of the RSECon26 conference vision, we are launching the RSECon26 research software submissions. The goal of this new submission is to encourage RSEs to open and share their work, gaining both visibility and recognition for their contributi...
The latest RSE Newsletter is out! This month’s newsletter highlights our continued work championing the often-overlooked contributions that drive research forward, from the Hidden-REF project to our newly published CoARA action plan. We also bring updates from across our community, including SIG news, upcoming events, and opportunities to get involved. The deadline for one item is today, hence the slightly early release!
Welcome to the start of the festive season and to our November Newsletter. This month’s newsletter highlights our continued work championing the often-overlooked contributions that drive research forward, from the Hidden-REF project to our newly published CoARA action plan. We also bring updates from across our community, including SIG news, upcoming events, and opportunities to get involved. Headlines Our main news this month surrounds the Hidden-REF project and our work championing the work of Research Software Engineers. Meet your new Trustees A new cohort of volunteers was elected to join the board of trustees for the Society at our AGM at the RSE Conference back in September. In our latest blog post, we say thank you to our colleagues who stood down this year, and introduce you to the new voices who will be representing our members and helping shape the future of the Society over the next twelve months. SocRSE outlines its commitment to supporting CoARA SocRSE’s roots are in improving the recognition of those involved in contributing to research in a non-traditional sense, and has championed the formal role of the Research Software Engineer for over a decade. It has directly supported and championed the Hidden-REF project that works to raise the recognition of ‘non-traditional’ research contributions traditionally ignored in the REF assessments. By being signatories of CoARA and formulating an action plan we reinforce our commitment to championing the valuable contributions made to research by software, and those working in non-traditional roles. We are excited to announce the publication of our CoARA action plan, which will be available on Zenodo. Festival of Hidden REF 2025 The second Festival of Hidden REF took place on Tuesday, 7 and Wednesday, 8 October 2025 at Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum, following the inaugural event in 2023. The Festival focuses on raising recognition of the diverse range of outputs and roles that are vital to research. The Festival is a key part of the Hidden REF campaign because it is used to collect new ideas, learn about the latest developments and, most importantly, celebrate everyone who contributes to research success. The event brought together around 150 individuals working in vital-but-unrecognised roles, people working with outputs that are not-traditionally submitted to the REF and policymakers, publishers and others involved in research assessment. Attendees took part in networking activities, lightning talks, roundtables, plenary talks and took part in a research study that compressed around 12 months of research activity into two hours! This event was supported by the Society’s Events and Initiatives Fund. https://hidden-ref.org/the-festival-of-hidden-ref/ Community News & Events We have a few updates from the Special Interest groups this month, as well as an upcoming deadline for the open science retreat, as well as other events and updates from the community. RSE Leaders and Aspiring Leaders Network The purpose of this special interest group is to provide a forum for existing RSE leaders to support each other, for aspiring leaders to gain experience and network, to coordinate the gathering and maintenance of resources supporting both groups, and to be a clear entry point to the leaders community. Although initiated from the UK RSE community, the SIG welcomes leaders and aspiring leaders from around the world and from “RSE-adjacent” professions. Many of our events support virtual participation. We have a public #leaders channel in Slack for discussion, a mailing list for news, and a private channel for group leaders. Do join us! https://society-rse.org/community/rse-leaders-network Green RSE SIG – Following on from RSECon25 The Green RSE Special Interest Group has published a blog which reflects on the session they ran at RSECon and sets out their plans for the next year. https://www.software.ac.uk/blog/rses-can-lead-sustainable-research-we-cant-just-rely-their-goodwill Teaching and Training SIG Updates Following on from the launch of the Teaching and Train SIG at the RSE Con Training Satellite Day, the SIG is excited to launch their roadmap for the coming year. The road map outlines our planned activity for the next 12 months. To keep up to date with our activities please join our Slack channel and keep an eye out for upcoming events. https://society-rse.org/teaching-and-training-sig/ Open Science Retreat – application deadline Sunday! The Open Science Retreat is coming to the UK!April 7-11, 2026 at The Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, Wales. Open Science Retreats are gatherings dedicated to promoting transparency, collaboration, and innovation in research, which offer participants an opportunity to collaborate to create systemic change, engage in career mentorship, and to mentally reset in a natural setting over the course of a multi-day residential unconference. Applications close Sunday (30th Nov)!https://open.science-retreat.org/OSR26UK/ Implications of the use of Generative AI in Software Development, Application and Licensing Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming materials design and discovery by driving innovations in hardware architectures, software solutions for materials modelling and digital infrastructures collating data from computational and experimental characterisation and processing them using data science to enable learning and generate new knowledge. We seek to explore how the design, optimisation, and performance of computational tools are affected by this transformation on the path of enabling us to tackle more complex challenges with greater efficiency and accuracy. We have launched a questionnaire to survey the practices, issues and implications of using Generative AI in the research software engineering area. Have your say! https://emmc.eu/fa-software-event-2025-11/ Open Research devroom at FOSDEM 2026 Once again, the Open Research Devroom will be present at FOSDEM. If you are a scientist, a tool builder or more generally someone interested in doing open and collaborative research, we want to hear from you! https://research-fosdem.github.io/#call-for-presentations Society Updates And finally, our regular reminder that we have a number of events, initiatives and resources that you might want to check out. These are linked below. Special Interest Groups We have eight Special Interest Groups being run by our community members, and supported by the Society. Check out our SIGs page to get involved (or start your own!). Events and Initiatives Fund The Society has Events and Initiatives funding to provide support for events and initiatives which support our mission statement and charitable objectives. Membership Not yet a […]
#Valve announces desktop machine and #VR goggles powered by KDE's #Plasma desktop.
We adopted the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard at Freedesktop! It's now part of the regular set of specifications, and we can make edits, of course.
Right now, it is very historically interesting, but hopefully it will be practical in future too and receive some modernization!
You can read the current HTML spec of FHS 3.0 at:
https://specifications.freedesktop.org/fhs/latest/
#freedesktop #linux #unix #linuxfoundation
This standard consists of a set of requirements and guidelines for file and directory placement under UNIX-like operating systems. The guidelines are intended to support interoperability of applications, system administration tools, development tools, and scripts as well as greater uniformity of documentation for these systems.
How independent is UK science advice? Not as much as you’d like!
https://open.substack.com/pub/christinapagel/p/the-uks-independent-scientific-bodies
@Cambridge_RCS is pleased to once again sponsor #RSECon25 as part of AIRR.
Here’s @milliams giving the lightning talk.
Please come and see our stand and pick up some swag.
SSI
Society of RSE
Glyph
KDE
Matthias Klumpp
Bryan Lawrence
Chris Edsall