The "RSE in Germany" Mission Statement

JuRSE and HiRSE_PS raise awareness, increase visibility and improve good practice for Research Software Engineering for students and researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich and within Helmholtz Information. The teams also act as points of contact for everyone interested in this topic and support the national and international RSE community through collaborations, joint events, projects, and the RSE online community platform.

Both JuRSE and HiRSE_PS share many of their goals and activities with the German RSE community and the de-RSE e.V..

Researchers, scientists and others developing software in and for research within the German scientific landscape have come together in the de-RSE community in order to considerably boost the visibility of these issues, and to decisively improve the current situation. de-RSE aims at constituting a wider initiative for acting jointly on shared objectives, and being the collective spokesperson for RSEs within the German scientific landscape.

The de-RSE e.V. is run by volunteers only, who are passionate about RSE and who dedicate a good portion of their time to this cause. Finding these volunteers and making their contribution visible for their home institutions, their projects, and the research landscape is already hard work with lots of responsibilities. It is impressive what has been achieved in the past years, but examples from other countries prove that there are better ways to establish software as a first-class citizen and RSE as a key competence in science. One such example is the UK and its Software Sustainability Institute (SSI). 

The SSI was founded in 2010 as the first organisation in the world dedicated to improving software in research. It was founded on the premise that helping individuals and institutions understand the vital role that software plays in research would accelerate progress in every field of scientific and academic endeavour. The SSI set itself the ambitious goal of transforming academic culture by establishing the principle that reliable, reproducible, and reusable software is necessary across all research disciplines. Despite the magnitude of this challenge, the SSI has delivered substantive improvements and achieved a number of truly global successes. It is a partnership of four UK universities (Edinburgh, Manchester, Southampton, Oxford) and is currently funded by the seven councils of the UK Research and Innovation.

A similar initiative is the US RSE Association which justly received seed funding through the Alfred P. Sloan foundation to put their efforts on more solid ground.

The key to success of associations like the SSI is precisely this: solid ground. Countries like the UK, the US and Germany with a rich, diverse research landscape have lots of people capable and willing to bring forward the field of RSE on a national level, if they are reliably supported in doing so. 

If the German research community sees software as an integral part of their work, following the global RSE motto “Better Software, Better Research” then this integral part needs dedicated attention.

In the long term, sustainable software engineering supports the national goal of digital sovereignty, reducing dependencies on foreign software products and making the German research landscape more attractive to students and researchers.

Yet, supporting software engineering for scientific codes cannot be done by volunteers only. Similarly, providing RSE education and building a thriving community of practice needs continuous effort exceeding the capabilities and competences of volunteering individuals. An overarching German initiative with sustainable, reliable funding is required, following the UK and US blueprints. JuRSE and HiRSE_PS are ready to play a key role in this initiative.