Sustainability, Equity, and Research Software Engineering

Open Science advocates that science is a common good, and that all inputs, processes, and results associated with research activities should be public and open to all, while respecting ethical and legal constraints. Software plays a central role in Open Science, whether as part of the scientific method, one of its outcomes, or as part of the infrastructure required for research. In such a context, there is a legitimate concern about the quality of software and its growing influence on the reproducibility of studies by independent researchers. Sustainability and equity are relevant attributes to ensure that software is actively maintained for reuse and preserved for reproducibility.

"Research software" is software developed in the context of scientific research, typically by domain-expert researchers, but often with limited knowledge, experience, and methodological/tooling support to consider sustainability and equity in research software development.

This presentation will introduce concepts related to Open Science and research software and discuss initiatives to motivate and promote sustainability and equity in research software development.

Christina von Flach is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Computing at Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). Her research interests include socio-technical aspects of software ecosystems, software sustainability, and project-based learning in free software. She co-organized the 1st Workshop on Open Science Practices in Software Engineering Research, held during CBSOFT 2021. She co-chaired the Research Track Program Committee of the Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES 2022), with the theme "Towards Software Sustainability," and proposed the "Open Science Policies" document adopted at SBES 2022 and SBES 2023. She co-organized the Seminar on Challenges and Practices of Open Science in Computing, a satellite event of the Brazilian Computing Society Congress (CSBC 2023), and presented the course "Principles and Practices for Research Software Sustainability" at the CSBC 2023. She is a member of SBC (Brazilian Computing Society) and a Senior Member of IEEE. Webpage: https://christinaflach.github.io/