Speaker
Description
The EU-funded EVERSE project aims to establish a framework for research software and code excellence, collaboratively designed and championed by five European research communities, including physics and astronomy.EVERSE’s ultimate ambition is to contribute towards a cultural change where research software is recognized as a first-class citizen of the scientific process and the people that contribute to it are credited for their efforts.
This contribution will outline the network's goals and present the achievements of the network so far, specifically the foundation of a European Network of Research Software Quality and the steps toward a future Virtual Institute for Research Software Excellence, including the creation of the EVERSE Network.
A major project output is the Research Software Quality Toolkit (RSQKit - https://everse.software/RSQKit/), which contains curated best practices, supporting tools, and resources for improving research software quality. RSQKit is designed for researchers, research software engineers, and those involved in research infrastructure or policy. Its practices are grounded in software excellence and quality within a research context, with a focus on FAIR software, Open Research, and effective engineering practices across different tiers of research software (analysis scripts, prototype tools, and infrastructure).
Finally, the contribution will detail how the EVERSE project interacts with the European Open Science Clusters (ENVRI-FAIR for environmental sciences, Life Sciences RI, ESCAPE for Particle physics and astrophysics, PaNOSC for Photon and neutron science, and SSHOC for social sciences and humanities) through real-world software use cases. These use cases test the software excellence framework, drawing best practices from various communities, and where the various elements of the software excellence framework are tested and implemented prior to their release to the wider community. Specifically, we will describe the three ESCAPE use cases for High Energy Physics, highlight the field’s contributions to EVERSE, and outline the expected pathway for improvements by the project's conclusion in 2027.