March 2025

Welcome everyone to the JuRSE newsletter!

JuRSE (Jülich Research Software Engineering) is a grassroots community for all FZJ scientists and students who code and/or anyone interested in research software. (https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse)

The purpose of this newsletter is to update you about JuRSE community initiatives at FZJ and some of the national and international activities in Research Software Engineering and inspire you to get involved in the community. 

Please feel free to forward this to any colleagues who may be interested in this topic and in joining the JuRSE Community.

Two quick ways you can get involved:

JuRSE news

New training courses from JuRSE

‘Setting up research projects where code is relevant’ - 12th March - 10am - free 
Are you leading or participating in research projects where team members write code to analyse data, run computations, or develop models? Then you might be interested in this new training course. Target audience: Research team leaders and postdocs who have leadership tasks. In this workshop, the Digital Research Academy will explore best practices for setting up and managing such projects to ensure they run efficiently, collaboratively, and successfully. They will cover key topics including Project Management with Git and Team Collaboration.

‘Automated Testing’ - 25th March - 1pm - free of charge
How can you prevent others and even yourself from breaking your code? Do you write Python code and use Git, but want to take your project to the next level? Then this event might be of interest to you. In this hands-on tutorial, we will learn why tests are useful and important for research software, what tests can look like, and how to run tests automatically when code is changed. We will briefly discuss different types of tests and test design.

And don’t forget to check out the HIDA courses (see below). If you can’t see the course you need or want, get in touch with us. We may know where to find an alternative and we’re always interested to hear what resources our community needs. Contact cl.wyatt@fz-juelich.de, Claire Wyatt, Community Manager Research Software Engineering.

More JuRSE travel grants!
JuRSE is again providing some competitive travel grants (https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/community-initiatives/jurse-travel-grants) for FZJ employees to attend the US RSE Conference. The theme of this year’s annual US RSE Conference (https://us-rse.org/usrse25/) is “Code, Practices, and People", taking place in Philadelphia from 6th-8th October and they’ve just opened their call for submissions! Check out their website for more information about the themes and what/how to submit.

The travel grant covers the full trip: travel, accommodation, registration fee, and a daily allowance as per the usual business trip rules. All the information about how to apply and what is expected is on our JuRSE website but feel free to email us if you have a question rse@fz-juelich.de or cl.wyatt@fz-juelich.de. Deadline for travel grant submissions is the 4th April 5pm CEST.

Open Hours (every Wednesday - https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/community-initiatives/jurse-open-hours)
All are welcome to come and talk to us about anything and this is an opportunity to learn from each other and expand our collective knowledge so everyone is welcome to join.

Some of the discussions we had in February were about software publication and the questions that often come with it. For example, when a researcher (or a group) has their code in a repository, what are the next steps? What licence should the project have? Is there someone at FZJ who can assist with licensing? What structure should the project’s repository follow? What should the documentation include? How can others contribute to the project? How can a release be created? What is a PID (persistent identifier)? That’s why we are here! Come join us for one of the next Open Hours!

JuRSE Code of the Month
The JuRSE Team want to shine a spotlight on the diverse and excellent research software that is being primarily developed at Forschungszentrum Jülich and to do this we’re showcasing one research software a month. This month’s code is developed at the Institute for Advanced Simulation, Jülich Supercomputing Centre.

March’s Code of the Month is MPTRAC which stands for “Massive-Parallel Trajectory Calculations” and is a Lagrangian particle dispersion model for the analysis of atmospheric transport processes in the free troposphere and stratosphere. Click through to our website (https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/community-initiatives/jurse-code-of-the-month/march-2025) to find out what the JuRSE team like about this software.

deRSE25 Conference - Karlsruhe, February 2025

March 2025


A group of 21 FZJers recently attended the deRSE25 conference in Karlsruhe. We presented posters, talks and networked with peers who create research software from across Germany and worldwide.

If you’re thinking of attending next year, you can see the type of contributions here https://events.hifis.net/event/1741/contributions/ and the slides, posters and resources from this year’s conference are being gathered in this Zenodo community: https://zenodo.org/communities/derse25 .

March 2025

The JuRSE travel grant winners (to the right) enjoyed the experience and also contributed through talks, posters, and workshops.

Helmholtz Program-oriented funding (PoF)
You may know that the PoF reviews are underway at the moment on campus. In case you are presenting or contributing, be prepared for questions concerning your research software and remember to talk about JuRSE! https://www.helmholtz.de/fileadmin/user_upload/01_forschung/pof/EN_Factsheet_PoF_as_of_180914.pdf

HiRSE News

The JuRSE team work closely with the HiRSE project so we include their news here too (https://www.helmholtz-hirse.de/).

40th HiRSE Seminar - Samantha Wittke - ‘CodeRefinery: A Community for Teaching, Learning, and Growing Together’
Join us Friday 7th March at 11am CET for the 40th HiRSE Seminar where Samantha Wittke will explore CodeRefinery and how it’s relevant to those doing research software engineering. No registration needed, just join us on zoom: https://fz-juelich-de.zoom.us/j/66397597271?pwd=TmdSdGRudGc5QjI0ZjBLWmI1Mlk0UT09

More speakers needed! We’re always looking for more speakers for this seminar series so please email Claire (cl.wyatt@fz-juelich.de) if you have a suggestion.

Promoting research software: Made in Germany
We now have 73 codes in this initiative. Can we get to 100 codes soon?! Check out the codes that are already taking part in this campaign: https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/community-initiatives/the-hirse-code-promotion

What is this initiative all about? Researchers, postdocs, and students at German universities and research centres write great research software. The HiRSE team wants to make that more visible by bringing your software to the attention of the RSE Community and beyond. We’re looking for research software created, extended and/or maintained by people working at German institutions to join our latest initiative. This is not meant exclusively, we of course welcome also software written by international teams, as long as there is a substantial contribution coming from Germany.

Here is our offer: You provide us with the details of your software using our form https://go.fzj.de/research_software_promotion and we’ll create your promo slide that will be shown ahead of a HiRSE Seminar and during HiRSE event breaks. If you have more ideas where this slide can be used, feel free to let us know (and use it yourself, of course)! If you have any questions or would like to suggest a project that is not your own, please do not hesitate to contact us under hirse@fz-juelich.de.

HIDA Training courses
Check out all the relevant courses for research software engineering on the HIDA course catalogue like Data processing, Continuous Integration, Graphics with R and lots more: https://www.helmholtz-hida.de/course-catalog/en/

National Initiatives

A new approach for a quality indicator for software
Research software plays a pivotal role in the Helmholtz Association. So HGF decided to also include software in its research evaluation. A dedicated task group has proposed a new evaluation approach that recognizes software quality through multiple dimensions rather than a single score. This multi-faceted framework considers different factors (like the FAIR4RS criteria), acknowledging the complexity and diverse contributions of research software.

To read more about this:https://os.helmholtz.de/en/open-science-in-helmholtz/working-group-open-science/task-group-quality-indicators/ and to see the presentation slides from deRSE25 on this: https://events.hifis.net/event/1741/contributions/13938/

Survey on Software Management Plans
Software management plans (SMPs) address crucial aspects in the management of research projects involving research software development and use early on, and establish the necessary requirements for the project. However, SMPs have not yet found widespread adoption. To help understand why this is the case, and what can be done to support researchers’ and RSEs’ needs in an optimal way, we kindly ask you to contribute to these efforts by completing a short survey: https://limesurvey.urz.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/525728?lang=en. The survey will be open until March 23rd.

RSE podcast episodes

Upcoming events

Nordic-RSE, Sweden - May 20-21, 2025
The 2025 edition of the Nordic-RSE conference will be held in Gothenburg on May 20-21 approximately 9-17 CEST. If you are interested in Research Software Engineering and want to connect with the community in the Nordics, you are warmly encouraged to join.Call for contributions are now open with a deadline of the 16th March. https://nordic-rse.org/nrse2025/

Workshop on reproducible science and its transformative potential for science - 4th Helmholtz Reproducibility Workshop on March 25, 2025
In this workshop, the Helmholtz Open Science office will delve into the core of reproducible science and its transformative potential for science. The event will address ‘Software reproducibility for data processing and machine learning workflows in the age of AI’ and consider the ‘Contextualisation of reproducibility in the organisation of academic work’. There will also be two on-site workshops: One will deal with the ‘Reproducibility of methods and results’, the other with the ‘Pre-validation of images’. Program and registration: https://events.hifis.net/event/1750/

That’s it for March! See you in the RSE rocketchat channel.

Last Modified: 02.04.2025