Funding
The Alliance supports Canadian research software by building on the good work done by CANARIE, the only national funder with a focus on research software for 15 years. Local institutional research software teams, as well as domain communities, have benefited from CANARIE’s funding and will continue to do so through future funding programs from the Alliance, including the launch of a research software funding call. Stay tuned by subscribing to our newsletter and checking our funding opportunities page.
Initiatives
The Alliance Software Management Plan (SMP) Template is launched
Software has become an essential part of modern research and is increasingly recognized as an important output of research. Despite years of wide adoption of Data Management Plans (DMPs) to ensure good data management practices are followed, in Canada there were currently no clear guidelines that instruct various stakeholders how to plan for a piece of software to be properly developed, maintained, shared, and reused. To address this gap, the Alliance launched the Alliance Software Management Plan (SMP) Template (English/French).
What is an SMP?
A Software Management Plan (SMP) is a structured document detailing how a specific software project is developed, maintained, and curated. It ensures that the software remains accessible, (re)usable and sustainable over time, benefiting developers, maintainers, and others involved in the software lifecycle. Ideally, an SMP is drafted at the project's outset but can also enhance existing projects by summarizing established practices and fostering continuous improvement.
Benefits of using the Alliance SMP Template
The SMP can help funders to encourage, support and promote software recognition and good practices (e.g., FAIR4RS), facilitate culture change and, support communities, ensuring consistent adherence to certain software management standards and policies. It can also support and upskill researchers to develop higher-quality software, which will likely be an important part of a researcher’s portfolio in the future.
If you are a Funder, a Policy Maker, an Institutional Administrator, a Publisher, or a Service Provider: you are encouraged to use this SMP template
- as a basis or inspiration for guidelines or policies;
- to assess software against funding requirements and quality standards (e.g., compute platform, PaaS, IaaS, SaaS);
- to ensure organizational support (e.g., support infrastructure, training program, support personnel such as software stewards/professionals) for SMP implementation;
- to ensure the software is properly managed as described in the SMP; or
- to ensure published research can be reproduced with the software (together with associated data and documentation) that was used to generate the results.
If you are a Software Developer, Software User, Researcher, a Software Manager, or a PI of a Group: you are encouraged to use this SMP template
- to inform the proposal writing process;
- as a guide to adopt best practices in ongoing or new software development efforts;
- to assess software quality and technical level in order to maximize the chances of adoption;
- to assess software compatibility with the overall project scope, deliverable, and timelines;
- as a checklist prior to publication; or
- to evaluate software reliability (e.g., interoperability, flexibility, extensibility vs. reinventing) for ongoing or new research projects.
In the future, the SMP template could be–similar to DMPs–tailored to the specific needs of particular types of research software, and made machine-actionable SMPs (maSMP), etc.
For questions or feedback on the Alliance SMP Template, please contact rs-lr@alliancecan.ca.
Events
This year, the Alliance is lending support to CANARIE for the Canadian Research Software Conference 2022 and will host and lead the planning of future research software conferences afterward.
Software Registry
As the Alliance works to develop its approach to a comprehensive software registry, CANARIE will wind down its research software registry at science.canarie.ca at the end of August 2022.
Research Software Current State Paper
The details of the Canadian research software landscape are described in detail in the 2022 Research Software (English/French) Current State Paper. This document is an important element in the Alliance’s strategy and community engagement. The research data management and advanced research computing papers are also available and include information of interest to the research software community.