Research Software Challenges: What are they and how to tackle them

Research Software Challenges: What are they and how to tackle them

🕒 Wednesday 17th June 2026, 15:00–16:30
📍 South Kensington Campus, Imperial College London
📝 Please register here to receive joining information and for catering purposes

Join us for this talk by Dr. Teresa Gomez-Diaz, Gaspard-Monge Computer Science Laboratory (LIGM), Université Gustave Eiffel on Wednesday 17th June at 15:00. The talk will be followed by refreshments.

Abstract

Our goal in this talk is to study the challenges that still persist in the production, dissemination, and evaluation of research software, and the solutions we have proposed to tackle them.

The first challenge is related to its definition: What exactly does “Research Software” mean? Several definitions of this concept have been proposed recently, but what are the important characteristics of research software that demonstrate that its meaning is correctly and uniformly understood within the scientific community?

In our 2019 work, we proposed a definition of “Research Software” that constitutes the basis for the proposed solutions to address other challenges. These include dissemination of research software as a free (or open-source) artefact, or its evaluation as a scientific output.

We will present work done in collaboration with Tomas Recio, Professor at the University Antonio de Nebrija (Madrid).

References

[2019] On the evaluation of research software: the CDUR procedure, [version 2; peer review: 2 approved]. F1000Research 2019, 8:1353, https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.19994.2.
[2023] How to achieve FAIRER research data by studying evaluation assessment protocols, Open Science FAIR, Madrid 2023, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8398431.
[2024] The conundrum challenges for Research Software in Open Science, Computers 2024, 13(11), 302; https://doi.org/10.3390/computers13110302.
[2026] Research software : qui es-tu ? Une conversation scientifique et juridique sur les logiciels de la recherche, 1024 : Bulletin de la Société Informatique de France, juin 2026.

About the speaker

Dr Teresa Gomez-Diaz is a CNRS Research Engineer at the Gaspard-Monge Computer Science laboratory (LIGM) at the University Gustave Eiffel (Est of Paris) since 2002. She has a Ph. D. in Computer Algebra from University of Limoges, France (1994). T. Gomez-Diaz’s mission at the LIGM is to render the Research Software and Research Data production of the lab visible and accessible in the context of Open Science. There, she works on how to improve the development and dissemination conditions of the LIGM outputs since 2006. In collaboration with Prof. T. Recio since 2018, she has proposed the CDUR evaluation protocols for research outputs, and the definition of Open Science as the political and legal framework where research outputs are shared and disseminated in order to be rendered visible, accessible and reusable. She is currently working on further Open Science and Research on Research issues. See https://ligm.univ-eiffel.fr/~teresa/