How is research software managed at UMCs?: insights from a first meetup

Netherlands eScience Center
Netherlands eScience Center
3 min readNov 11, 2024

Written by eScience Center Fellow Thomas Pronk

On October 7th, 2024, the Digital Competence Centers (DCCs) of the seven Dutch University Medical Centers (UMCs) had a vibrant meetup, joined by representatives from Health-RI, ELIXIR-NL, The Netherlands eScience Center, and TDCC-LSH. We discussed Research Software Management (RSM) in the context of Dutch UMCs, identifying shared challenges, opportunities for collaboration, and how we could connect with the broader landscape of organizations, communities, and networks.

On October 7th, 2024, the Digital Competence Centers (DCCs) of the seven Dutch University Medical Centers (UMCs) came together in a meetup, joined by representatives from Health-RI, ELIXIR-NL, The Netherlands eScience Center, and TDCC-LSH. We discussed Research Software Management (RSM) in the context of Dutch UMCs, identifying shared challenges, opportunities for collaboration, and how we could connect with the broader landscape of organizations, communities, and networks.

Medical research often concerns highly sensitive data and interventions that impact lives. Consequently, we put stringent demands on privacy, security, quality, and reproducibility. In pursuit of meeting these demands, the Dutch UMCs have developed a strong tradition of collaboration and expertise in data stewardship. Our RSM approaches have drawn from these, along with well-established software development practices. However, the institution-wide introduction of RSM policies is relatively new. Correspondingly, RSM at Dutch UMCs is currently at a formative stage. We have the opportunity to jointly address the challenges that come with introducing RSM and we are well-equipped to do so.

Photo by Zhen H on Unsplash

To get started, we each listed our top three challenges, opportunities, and projects to know about, in a survey. Based on the results, we jointly identified five focus areas in pursuing joint RSM:

  • Distill guidelines from decentral expertise. There is already substantial expertise in research software spread out over departments at Dutch UMCs. At the central level, we can learn from this experience to develop good practice guidelines that are attuned with practice, can be developed into policies, and are aligned with national and international efforts such as the TDCC-LSH FAIR Tool framework, EOSC EVERSE and OpenEBench.
  • Standardize Software Management Plans (SMPs). By working together to standardize on a common format, we can link SMP sections to common support materials and offer default answers based on common best practices. Recognizing the variety of software types and roles, the standard could be made adaptive to its use cases (e.g., Practical Guide to SMPs, ELIXIR Software Management Wizard).
  • Develop intermediate-level training. Basic research software training can draw from existing initiatives such as those from the eScience Center, LCRDM, and The Carpentries (see Research Software Training NL). However, there is a need for intermediate training that focuses on more advanced skills and best practices adapted to the specific needs of medical research. The intermediate training could take a variety of forms, such as ReproHacks, Programming CAFEs, and mentoring schemes.
  • Define research software-related job profiles. Embedding RSM on an institutional level requires a range of new roles with well-defined responsibilities. Here, we can draw inspiration from work on Data Stewardship (e.g., Ingeborg et al., 2019; Scholtens, 2019) and Research Software Engineering (e.g., eScience Center RSE Job Role Descriptions and Job Profiles, Research Software Competencies Toolkit).
  • Connect to national and international networks. In pursuit of the above, we seek to align our output with internationally recognized standards, tools, and platforms for (biomedical, life sciences, and health) research software. Natural candidates are offered by our membership of the European ELIXIR network, for instance, the RDM Toolkit tool assemblies and regional resource index, the ELIXIR Tools Platform, TeSS training platform, EOSC EVERSE and ELIXIR-STEERS. Other relevant networks for research software are the national research software engineer (RSE) network (NL-RSE) and the various regional and national RSE organizations around the globe.

This meeting was made possible by funding from the eScience Center for the Fellowship Project Implementing software management plans in medical science to improve science and safety. If any of the focus areas above strike your fancy, then you might make a great eScience Center Fellow.

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Published in Netherlands eScience Center

We’re an independent foundation with 80+ passionate people working together in the Netherlands’ national centre for academic research software.

Written by Netherlands eScience Center

Dutch national center for digital expertise. We help those in academic research develop open, sustainable, high quality software tools.