Welcome to the start of the festive season and to our November Newsletter. This month’s newsletter highlights our continued work championing the often-overlooked contributions that drive research forward, from the Hidden-REF project to our newly published CoARA action plan. We also bring updates from across our community, including SIG news, upcoming events, and opportunities to get involved.

Headlines

Our main news this month surrounds the Hidden-REF project and our work championing the work of Research Software Engineers.

Meet your new Trustees

A new cohort of volunteers was elected to join the board of trustees for the Society at our AGM at the RSE Conference back in September. In our latest blog post, we say thank you to our colleagues who stood down this year, and introduce you to the new voices who will be representing our members and helping shape the future of the Society over the next twelve months.

SocRSE outlines its commitment to supporting CoARA

SocRSE’s roots are in improving the recognition of those involved in contributing to research in a non-traditional sense, and has championed the formal role of the Research Software Engineer for over a decade. It has directly supported and championed the Hidden-REF project that works to raise the recognition of ‘non-traditional’ research contributions traditionally ignored in the REF assessments. By being signatories of CoARA and formulating an action plan we reinforce our commitment to championing the valuable contributions made to research by software, and those working in non-traditional roles. We are excited to announce the publication of our CoARA action plan, which will be available on Zenodo.

Festival of Hidden REF 2025

The second Festival of Hidden REF took place on Tuesday, 7 and Wednesday, 8 October 2025 at Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum, following the inaugural event in 2023. The Festival focuses on raising recognition of the diverse range of outputs and roles that are vital to research. The Festival is a key part of the Hidden REF campaign because it is used to collect new ideas, learn about the latest developments and, most importantly, celebrate everyone who contributes to research success.

The event brought together around 150 individuals working in vital-but-unrecognised roles, people working with outputs that are not-traditionally submitted to the REF and policymakers, publishers and others involved in research assessment. Attendees took part in networking activities, lightning talks, roundtables, plenary talks and took part in a research study that compressed around 12 months of research activity into two hours!

This event was supported by the Society’s Events and Initiatives Fund.

https://hidden-ref.org/the-festival-of-hidden-ref/

Community News & Events

We have a few updates from the Special Interest groups this month, as well as an upcoming deadline for the open science retreat, as well as other events and updates from the community.

RSE Leaders and Aspiring Leaders Network

The purpose of this special interest group is to provide a forum for existing RSE leaders to support each other, for aspiring leaders to gain experience and network, to coordinate the gathering and maintenance of resources supporting both groups, and to be a clear entry point to the leaders community. Although initiated from the UK RSE community, the SIG welcomes leaders and aspiring leaders from around the world and from “RSE-adjacent” professions. Many of our events support virtual participation. We have a public #leaders channel in Slack for discussion, a mailing list for news, and a private channel for group leaders. Do join us!

https://society-rse.org/community/rse-leaders-network

Green RSE SIG – Following on from RSECon25

The Green RSE Special Interest Group has published a blog which reflects on the session they ran at RSECon and sets out their plans for the next year.

https://www.software.ac.uk/blog/rses-can-lead-sustainable-research-we-cant-just-rely-their-goodwill

Teaching and Training SIG Updates

Following on from the launch of the Teaching and Train SIG at the RSE Con Training Satellite Day, the SIG is excited to launch their roadmap for the coming year. The road map outlines our planned activity for the next 12 months. To keep up to date with our activities please join our Slack channel and keep an eye out for upcoming events.

https://society-rse.org/teaching-and-training-sig/

Open Science Retreat – application deadline Sunday!

The Open Science Retreat is coming to the UK!
April 7-11, 2026 at The Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, Wales.

Open Science Retreats are gatherings dedicated to promoting transparency, collaboration, and innovation in research, which offer participants an opportunity to collaborate to create systemic change, engage in career mentorship, and to mentally reset in a natural setting over the course of a multi-day residential unconference.

Applications close Sunday (30th Nov)!
https://open.science-retreat.org/OSR26UK/

Implications of the use of Generative AI in Software Development, Application and Licensing

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming materials design and discovery by driving innovations in hardware architectures, software solutions for materials modelling and digital infrastructures collating data from computational and experimental characterisation and processing them using data science to enable learning and generate new knowledge. We seek to explore how the design, optimisation, and performance of computational tools are affected by this transformation on the path of enabling us to tackle more complex challenges with greater efficiency and accuracy.

We have launched a questionnaire to survey the practices, issues and implications of using Generative AI in the research software engineering area. Have your say!

https://emmc.eu/fa-software-event-2025-11/

Open Research devroom at FOSDEM 2026

Once again, the Open Research Devroom will be present at FOSDEM. If you are a scientist, a tool builder or more generally someone interested in doing open and collaborative research, we want to hear from you!

https://research-fosdem.github.io/#call-for-presentations

Society Updates

And finally, our regular reminder that we have a number of events, initiatives and resources that you might want to check out. These are linked below.

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