{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,2,21]],"date-time":"2025-02-21T19:44:39Z","timestamp":1740167079557,"version":"3.37.3"},"reference-count":8,"publisher":"F1000 Research Ltd","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2018,10,3]],"date-time":"2018-10-03T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1538524800000},"content-version":"tdm","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100000268","name":"Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["EP\/N006410\/1"],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100000268","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100000269","name":"Economic and Social Research Council","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["EP\/N006410\/1"],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100000269","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100000266","name":"Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["EP\/N006410\/1","EP\/H043160\/1"],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100000266","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":["f1000research.com"],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["F1000Res"],"abstract":"Background: <\/ns4:bold>This paper reports the results of an evaluation of the Software Sustainability Institute\u2019s Fellowship Programme, which focused on identifying and categorising the benefits that the fellowship has afforded its recipients, via a series of open questions.<\/ns4:p> Methods: <\/ns4:bold>The evaluation took the form of a survey open to people awarded Fellowships between 2012 and 2016, which asked people to report the effect that the programme had had on them, their institutions, their research domains and their careers.<\/ns4:p> Results: <\/ns4:bold>The results show that the Fellowship plays a wide-ranging role in supporting communities of best practice and skills transfer, and that a significant benefit is the way it has raised the profile of software in research, and those people who develop and advocate for it.<\/ns4:p> Conclusions: <\/ns4:bold>The evaluation of the programme has shown the need to support research software in situ<\/ns4:italic> and credit the engineers and researchers who are working in this important area that supports reproducibility, reuse and the integrity of research investments.<\/ns4:p>","DOI":"10.12688\/f1000research.16231.1","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2018,10,3]],"date-time":"2018-10-03T11:05:11Z","timestamp":1538564711000},"page":"1599","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.12688\/f1000research.crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":3,"title":["Raising the status of software in research: A survey-based evaluation of the Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship Programme"],"prefix":"10.12688","volume":"7","author":[{"given":"Shoaib","family":"Sufi","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6080-1382","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Caroline","family":"Jay","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"2560","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2018,10,3]]},"reference":[{"article-title":"The Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship Programme.","year":"1686","author":"S Sufi","key":"ref-1"},{"year":"2009","key":"ref-2","article-title":"Evaluation of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation\u2019s Humboldt Research Fellowship Programme"},{"key":"ref-3","first-page":"97","article-title":"Impact Evaluation of the Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger Fellowships with Return Phase.","author":"N Meyer","year":"2014"},{"article-title":"Impact Evaluation of the ICRETT, YY & ACSBI Fellowship Schemes.","year":"2013","author":"N Keith","key":"ref-4"},{"key":"ref-5","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"77-101","DOI":"10.1191\/1478088706qp063oa","article-title":"Using thematic analysis in psychology.","volume":"2","author":"V Braun","year":"2006","journal-title":"Qual Res Psychol."},{"key":"ref-6","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"62","DOI":"10.12688\/f1000research.3-62.v2","article-title":"Software Carpentry: lessons learned [version 2; referees: 3 approved].","volume":"3","author":"G Wilson","year":"2016","journal-title":"F1000Res."},{"key":"ref-7","article-title":"Open for business: a nation of global researchers and innovators."},{"key":"ref-8","article-title":"Dataset 1 in: Raising the status of software in research: A survey-based evaluation of the Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship Programme.","author":"S Sufi","year":"2018","journal-title":"F1000Research."}],"container-title":["F1000Research"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/f1000research.com\/articles\/7-1599\/v1\/pdf","content-type":"application\/pdf","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/f1000research.com\/articles\/7-1599\/v1\/xml","content-type":"application\/xml","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/f1000research.com\/articles\/7-1599\/v1\/iparadigms","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2020,3,12]],"date-time":"2020-03-12T07:40:11Z","timestamp":1583998811000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/f1000research.com\/articles\/7-1599\/v1"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2018,10,3]]},"references-count":8,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.12688\/f1000research.16231.1","relation":{"has-review":[{"id-type":"doi","id":"10.5256\/f1000research.17726.r42711","asserted-by":"subject"},{"id-type":"doi","id":"10.5256\/f1000research.17726.r39053","asserted-by":"subject"},{"id-type":"doi","id":"10.5256\/f1000research.17726.r40285","asserted-by":"subject"}]},"ISSN":["2046-1402"],"issn-type":[{"type":"electronic","value":"2046-1402"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2018,10,3]]},"assertion":[{"value":"Approved with reservations, Approved with reservations, Approved with reservations","URL":"https:\/\/f1000research.com\/articles\/7-1599\/v1#article-reports","order":0,"name":"referee-status","label":"Referee status","group":{"name":"current-referee-status","label":"Current Referee Status"}},{"value":"10.5256\/f1000research.17726.r39053, Colin C. Venters, School of Computing and Engineering\u00a0, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK, 17 Oct 2018, version 1, 3 approved with reservations","URL":"https:\/\/f1000research.com\/articles\/7-1599\/v1#referee-response-39053","order":0,"name":"referee-response-39053","label":"Referee Report","group":{"name":"article-reports","label":"Article Reports"}},{"value":"Shoaib Sufi<\/b>; \nPosted: 21 Nov 2018<\/i>; We thank the reviewer for his positive and helpful comments. We respond to the main themes in the reviewer\u2019s comments and suggestions below:It should be noted that the Fellowship is broad in its aim, and the survey aimed to capture its impact in the broadest terms, and not just from the perspective of software sustainability skills and uptake. By way of example, the use of distributed version control and commenting code are necessary conditions for sustainable software but they may not be sufficient conditions for sustainable software. The authors recognise that the path to software sustainability is a journey and the adoption of better practices are way-marks on this journey.We decided to exclude background\/demographic data of respondents as it may have enabled readers to identify individuals. It is true that information about the Fellows is available online; the issue in the current study is linking this to individual responses. Anonymity is an important part of the study methodology as a respondent\u2019s public response may be more guarded than a private response. The dataset show individuals criticising other members of their research community or institution. It would not have been appropriate to include alongside these comments information that could be used to identify them, and would have violated our ethical approval.The data are valid qualitative responses from a survey, collected using a well-established research methodology, and analysed in a systematic manner, and are thus not purely anecdotal. Whilst it is true that we cannot validate the objective truth of any response, this is true of responses to any survey, and is thus an accepted limitation of the design. Fellows were specifically asked to reflect on their own experience, and the survey thus depends upon self-reporting. There is unfortunately no baseline against which to compare the responses, as we cannot know what they would have done had they not received Fellowship.The fact that status emerged as a key theme is interesting rather than worrying. Our aim with this research was to systematically examine the self-reported benefits of the Fellowship to individuals and others. This could have resulted in people talking only about the events they had run; the value of the status conferred by the badge of the Fellowship is a result that has wider relevance for the Research Software Engineering Community, as the comments show that software engineering work is still perceived as being of lower value, and the Fellowship is helping to change that. The study did not aim to assess directly whether the Fellowship was leading to more sustainable software, as this is not methodologically feasible. It should be noted that in terms of professional development more responses (26) related to the professional development of others than the Fellows own professional development (17), see Table 3. We see this as evidence of its benefit to the community.We appreciate the suggestions for improving the background and will add this to a future version of the paper detailing the motivation for the Institute. We will comment on the relationship of this work with that by Hettrick \net al.<\/i> on the importance of Software in Research. Generating a cross walk of software sustainability concerns to emerging themes in other research areas such as those mentioned (requirements engineering, software architectures, HCI, and software engineering) are out of scope for this paper, but might form useful future work.A study on what better sustainability practices mean and identifying sustainability issues and which communities face them is a very large endeavour and this developing area is the focus of organisations such as the UK Software Sustainability Institute (www.software.ac.uk), WSSSPE (wssspe.researchcomputing.org.uk), URSSI (urssi.us), BSSw (bssw.io) and related sustainability researchers. This is out of scope for this paper. Certainly, portions of this space would make for very interesting studies and we thank the reviewer for his comments and suggestions in this regard.","URL":"https:\/\/f1000research.com\/articles\/7-1599\/v1#referee-comment-4249","order":1,"name":"referee-comment-4249","label":"Referee Comment","group":{"name":"article-reports","label":"Article Reports"}},{"value":"10.5256\/f1000research.17726.r42711, Dan Sholler, Berkeley Institute for Data Science, The rOpenSci Project, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA, 24 Jan 2019, version 1, 3 approved with reservations","URL":"https:\/\/f1000research.com\/articles\/7-1599\/v1#referee-response-42711","order":2,"name":"referee-response-42711","label":"Referee Report","group":{"name":"article-reports","label":"Article Reports"}},{"value":"10.5256\/f1000research.17726.r40285, Lois Curfman McInnes, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL, USA, 18 Feb 2019, version 1, 3 approved with reservations","URL":"https:\/\/f1000research.com\/articles\/7-1599\/v1#referee-response-40285","order":3,"name":"referee-response-40285","label":"Referee Report","group":{"name":"article-reports","label":"Article Reports"}},{"value":"This work was supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Grant EP\/H043160\/1 and EPSRC, BBSRC and ESRC Grant EP\/N006410\/1 for the UK Software Sustainability Institute. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.","order":4,"name":"grant-information","label":"Grant Information"},{"value":"This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Data associated with the article are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Zero \"No rights reserved\" data waiver (CC0 1.0 Public domain dedication).","order":0,"name":"copyright-info","label":"Copyright"}]}}