Konrad U. Förstner
University of Würzburg / Allianz Initiative: Ad-hoc AG Wissenschaftliche Software - Germany
Konrad Förstner studied Biochemistry with a minor in Computer Science at the University of Greifswald before conducting PhD research in the field of metagenomics in the computational systems biology group of Peer Bork at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL, Heidelberg). After his graduation and working in industry he became a joined postdoctoral researcher in the groups of Jörg Vogel (Institute for Infection Biology) and Cynthia Sharma (Research Centre for Infectious Diseases) at the University of Würzburg. Since 2013 Konrad Förstner is the head of bioinformatics at the Core Units Systems Medicine - a joint venture of the University and University Clinic of Würzburg. His main research topic is the integration of high-throughput sequencing data to create systems perspectives and computational models of pathogenic bacteria and their hosts.
May 10, 2017 12:00 - 12:30
Software has become an essential component in basically every part of the research cycle. Still, there are no comprehensive guidelines how core principles of good scientific practice like transparency and reproducibility can and should be applied to research software. Further open questions are how to guarantee high quality of such software, how current and future researchers need to be trained and incentivized to generate sustainable software. To ensure the frictionless reuse and long term availability of software, dedicated framework conditions and infrastructure for research software need to be established. At the same time knowledge about open/libre software licenses needs to be disseminated. These and numerous other issues were so far only partially and inconsistently addressed by German universities and funding/research institutions.
The Alliance of Science Organisations which consists of all large German research organisations (DFG, Fraunhofer Society, Helmholtz Association, Leibniz Association, Max Planck Society) and the universities has launched the ad-hoc working group "Research Software" as part of its initiative "Digital Information" to propose solutions for these issues. This working group aims to address the general questions regarding research software and to compile a set of guidelines and recommendations for the German and international research community.
In this talk those questions and their potential solutions will be presented and discussed.