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+---
+layout: post
+title: January 2025 Newsletter
+editor: Daniele Tartarini
+slug: 2025-01-09-newsletter
+date: 2025-01-09T12:00:00Z+0100
+tags:
+category:
+link:
+description:
+type: text
+---
+
+## The University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering Community Newsletter January 2025
+
+Welcome to the January 2025 newsletter for the research software community at The University of Sheffield, featuring news, opportunities, events and training for you.
+
+
+
+
+### Events
+
+#### Upcoming Local Events
+
+- 2025-01-29 11.00 \- 11.50am (hybrid) [ReproducibiliTea Journal Club](https://reproducibilitea-sheffield.github.io/posts/2025-01-29/), led by Dr Eddy Verbaan (Head of Library Research Support, Sheffield Hallam University) who has chosen the paper [OSF Preprints \| Working Paper No 6: Exploring Research Transparency, Positionality and Reproducibility](https://osf.io/preprints/osf/chyd4). Sheffield Institute of Education, Charles St Building, Charles St, Sheffield City Centre, Sheffield S1 2LX, UK.
+
+#### Upcoming External Events
+
+- 2025-01-13 - 2025-01-17 (hybrid) [N8CIR DRI Retreat 2025](https://n8cir.org.uk/training-and-events/dri-retreat-2025/) The Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) Retreat is a five-day event involving panel discussions and group sessions for technology specialists to develop soft skills and network with peers.
+- 2025 01 29 EPSRC Large Scale Computer User Requirements Town Hall (Oxford); This interactive event will provide an opportunity to discuss the user requirements for the engineering and physical sciences research community for large scale compute (hardware, software and data)
+https://engagementhub.ukri.org/epsrc-events/4daf6868 If you have any questions or require additional information, please do not hesitate to contact us at: [email protected]; [email protected].
+
+
+
+### Articles, Blogs, Papers & Podcasts
+
+#### Papers
+- Why don't we share data and code? Perceived barriers and benefits to public archiving practices, Dylan G. E. Gomes, _et al._ Proc. R. Soc. B. 2022 [10.1098/rspb.2022.1113](https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.1113)
+- The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Open Science in AI: A Replication Study Gundersen, Odd Erik, _et al._ 2024, [10.48550/arXiv.2412.17859](https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17859)
+- Gaps between Open Science activities and actual recognition systems: Insights from an international survey. Florencia Grattarola _et al._ PLOS One 2024 [10.1371/journal.pone.0315632](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0315632)
+- The zettabyte era is in our DNA. Daniella Bar-Lev, _et al._ Nature Computational Science 2024 [10.1038/s43588-024-00717-1](https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-024-00717-1)
+- From policy to practice: Lessons learned from an open science funding initiative. Dumanis, Sonya _et al._ 2023 [10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011626](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011626)
+
+#### Conferences
+
+- [eSCIENCE Chicago USA15 September 2025](https://www.escience-conference.org/2025/)
+
+#### Blogs/podcasts
+
+- Blog posts:
+  - [HPCRSE@RSECon24: 3rd annual meeting of the HPC RSE community](https://excalibur.ac.uk/hpcrsersecon24-3rd-annual-meeting-of-the-hpc-rse-community/)
+- Podcast: [Meet The Meetup: SheffieldR Users Group \- Interview with Grace Accad from the University of Sheffield](https://player.captivate.fm/episode/2414bcf1-4248-426d-8ef9-dc3f30b0e659/) Grace Accad was interviewed for the Sheffield Digital Podcast back in October talking about the [Sheffield R User Group](https://sheffieldr.github.io/).
+- Podcast: [Code for Thought](https://codeforthought.buzzsprout.com/):
+  - [ByteSized RSE: Fun with Containers \- Simon Li](https://codeforthought.buzzsprout.com/1326658/episodes/16133479-en-bytesized-rse-fun-with-containers-simon-li) We're kickstarting a round of new ByteSized RSE online classes and podcast episodes with an episode on containers. Focusing on Podman (used in the online class) and Docker.
+  - [Pascal or the art of keeping things simple \- in Memoriam of Niklaus Wirth](https://codeforthought.buzzsprout.com/1326658/episodes/16189116-en-pascal-or-the-art-of-keeping-things-simple-in-memoriam-of-niklaus-wirth) Niklaus Wirth is one of the computing pioneers and his work inspired many other technologies and a generation of engineers. In this episode I discuss one of his many contributions: the programming language Pascal.
+
+#### Research software practice
+
+- Reproducibility of Jupyter notebooks:
+  - [A Large-Scale Study About Quality and Reproducibility of Jupyter Notebooks](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8816763)
+  - [juv: A toolkit for reproducible Jupyter notebooks](https://github.com/manzt/juv)
+- Do you think the [FAIR Principles for Research Software](https://doi.org/10.15497/RDA00068) are working? Over 2 years after publishing, with over 500 people involved, we're keen to understand if the FAIR principles have been useful and usable. If not, we’re asking the community what needs changing to make them work. [Complete the survey here](https://forms.gle/sRhRQD4gWBQWzcGS7).
+- Relevant for anyone working with images: [Community-developed checklists for publishing images and image analyses](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-023-01987-9) and [associated guidance](https://quarep-limi.github.io/WG12_checklists_for_image_publishing/image_publishing/intro_image_publishing.html).
+- [NVIDIA AI Releases cuPyNumeric: A Drop-in Replacement Library for NumPy Bringing Distributed and Accelerated Computing for Python](https://www.marktechpost.com/2024/11/28/nvidia-ai-releases-cupynumeric-a-drop-in-replacement-library-for-numpy-bringing-distributed-and-accelerated-computing-for-python/)
+
+#### Open research
+
+- [Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles](https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/jlsc/article/id/16288/)
+
+### Opportunities
+
+- [Announcing FLOSS/fund: $1M per year for free and open source projects](https://floss.fund/blog/announcing-floss-fund/)
+- [Kaggle competition to predict protein structures from cryoET](https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/czii-cryo-et-object-identification/overview)
+- [CERN Studentships](https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/CERN/744000030886265-technical-studentship-it-mathematics-robotics-2025-2?trid=fc417a4d-3662-4c34-9d28-a1a2f96e15c3)
+
+
+### Training
+
+- 2025-02-17 - 18  [Reproducible computational environments using containers: introduction to Docker and Singularity](https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/courses/250217-containers/)
+- 2025-01-10 13:00-14:30 [Sign-up for Byte-sized RSE Season 3 Episode 2: Psychology of data visualisation](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfUAt8q4bH4yTLVrPEKg-b_3s5Oha5J3n0kQH4tRQ5jfYCgBg/viewform)
+  (NB Year is wrong on Google form, the source indicates its 2025) 
+- Archer2 Training (e.g. parallel programming, reproducibility via containers,) https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/#upcoming-training
+- NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute [Free training on AI and more](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/training/)
+
+#### FAIR<sup>2</sup> for research software
+
+This training curriculum offers a modular programme to support researchers in applying FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles and open research practices to their [research software](https://zenodo.org/records/6623556). The programme is aimed at researchers, including PhDs and postgraduate research students at the University of Sheffield, who create code (whether a few scripts or something more substantial) as part of their research and who want to make their research more open by applying the FAIR principles to their software or simply want to become more confident in the research code they are writing.
+
+To find out what the FAIR principles are and why they are crucial to make your research more open, you can watch the introductory talk by Head of Research Software Engineering, Romain Thomas, [_Better software for Better research: Introduction to the FAIR2 for Research Software training programme_](https://orda.shef.ac.uk/articles/media/Better_software_for_Better_research_Introduction_to_the_FAIR2_for_Research_Software_training_programme/27283239?file=49937889). You can also view the [slides](https://fair2-for-research-software.github.io/Better_software_for_better_research/#/title-slide) for this talk.
+
+The [FAIR<sup>2</sup> for research software training programme](https://rse.shef.ac.uk/training/fair4rs/) has been developed by the RSE, Data Analytics Service and Library teams and launched in October. The full syllabus is now live on [MyDevelopment](https://mydevelopment.csod.com/ui/lms-learning-details/app/curriculum/06573f55-12e4-44f1-be4c-fac5ea9d6851) (requires login). The programme will be continuing over the next few months, with the following courses now scheduled:
+
+
+- 2025-01-20 &amp; 2025-01-21, 9.00am \- 1.30pm [Git, GitHub and GitKraken - From Zero to Hero](https://rse.shef.ac.uk/training/fair4rs/#version-control)
+- 2025-02-06, 1.00pm \- 5.00pm [Testing and Continuous Integration](https://rse.shef.ac.uk/training/fair4rs/#testing-and-continuous-integration)
+- 2025-02-17 &amp; 2025-02-18, 9.00am \- 1.30pm [Git Collaboration](https://rse.shef.ac.uk/training/fair4rs/#version-control)
+- 2025-03-06, 9.00am \- 1.30pm [Documentation](https://rse.shef.ac.uk/training/fair4rs/#documentation)
+- 2025-03-24, 9.00am \- 1.30pm [Reproducible computational environments](https://rse.shef.ac.uk/training/fair4rs/#reproducible-computational-environments)
+- 2025-04-11, 1.30pm \- 5.00pm [Packaging](https://rse.shef.ac.uk/training/fair4rs/#packaging)
+
+
+### Jobs
+
+
+Check for advertised RSE and RSE-adjacent roles at the [RSE society's vacancies
+board](https://society-rse.org/careers/vacancies/).
+
+### Community
+
+#### Digital Research Practice Support Community
+
+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](https://groups.google.com/u/1/a/sheffield.ac.uk/g/digital-research-practice-support-community-group/about) to
+stay informed. Next meeting: Wednesday 29th January 2025 at 2pm.
+
+#### LunchBytes
+
+[LunchBytes](https://rse.shef.ac.uk/community/lunch-bytes/) are short talks from the research community on research
+software, data, and infrastructure.
+
+Due to capacity within the RSE team, there was very limited LunchBytes content over the past academic year.
+This should be changing soon, a new coordinator for LunchBytes has been found (Research IT's Farhad Allian), with a plan to reboot these lunchtime seminars in the spring semester.
+
+More information will be coming out over the coming months, so sign up to the [RSE mailing list](https://groups.google.com/a/sheffield.ac.uk/g/RSE-group) if you'd like to learn more about research software and associated practices, or get in contact with [Farhad](mailto:[email protected]) if you would like to share what you know at an upcoming session!
+
+### Support
+
+#### Code Clinics
+
+Why not come to a [Code Clinic](https://rse.shef.ac.uk/support/code-clinic/)? We're keen to help you.
+
+Code Clinics are fortnightly supported sessions run by the RSE team and IT Services’ [Research
+IT](https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/it-services/research) 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.
+
+#### Research IT HPC Drop In
+
+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](https://groups.google.com/u/1/a/sheffield.ac.uk/g/hpc).
+
+#### Research IT Consultations
+
+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>.
+
+## Sheffield RSE Team
+
+The Sheffield RSE Team aims to [collaborate](https://rse.shef.ac.uk/collaboration/) with you to help improve your
+research software. They can [provide dedicated staff](https://rse.shef.ac.uk/collaboration/provision/) to ensure that
+you can deliver excellent research software engineering on your research projects.
+
+## Research IT
+
+[Research IT](https://students.sheffield.ac.uk/it-services/research) 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.