Back for it’s 6th edition, this year’s STEP-UP RSLondon community conference (incorporating the former RSLondonSouthEast workshop) is expanding to support a wider community of “digital Research Technical Professionals” (dRTP).

Run by the UKRI-EPSRC-funded STEP-UP project and the Research Software London (RSLondon) community, the workshop will bring together digital Research Technical Professionals working with software, data and computing infrastructure, as well as researchers, academics, systems professionals and people from a range of other roles who are interested in Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI).

Submit an abstract

Taking place on Monday 7th July 2025, this year’s event will include, in addition to plenary sessions, parallel tracks focused specifically on:

  • Research Software
  • Research Data
  • Research Computing Infrastructure

You will be asked to select which track you are submitting to.

If you feel that your submission has general relevance across the wider dRTP space, you can select the general track option and if the submission is accepted, we will look to schedule it within a plenary session. However, due to limited space in the schedule, the Programme Committee reserves the right to schedule talks into a specific track where the submission is considered to have strong relevance to that track

We are inviting the submission of abstracts for:

  • Regular talks (15 minute talk, plus 5 minutes for questions)
  • Lightning talks (5 minutes)
  • Posters

All conference submissions must be made via the EasyChair platform.

Submit an abstract via EasyChair

Important Dates

  • Abstract submission deadline: 23:59 BST (UTC+1) on Wednesday 21st May 2025
  • Notification of acceptance: Thursday 6th June 2025
  • Conference registration closes: Friday 20th June 2025

Overview

With ever increasing demand for digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs) within the research community, a key focus for this year’s conference and the STEP-UP project in general, is how we effectively grow and support the dRTP community. How can we enhance the opportunities we offer for careers and development of technical skills across the areas of research software, research data and research computing infrastructure.

The workshop is aimed at anyone who builds, maintains or works with research software and research computing infrastructure as well as data scientists, data stewards and other research data management professionals. We are keen to receive submissions across a wide range of topics:

Topics

We invite the submission of abstracts covering all aspects of Research Software Engineering, research data and research computing including, but not limited to:

Software
  • Research software development best practices, including testing, CI/CD, code review, research software project management, etc.
  • Research software applications, tools and services
  • Open source software development
  • Application of research software skills to novel research challenges
  • RSE training and skills development activities
  • Building and running RSE groups and teams
Research Data
  • Institutional research data management structures and approaches
  • Data stewardship
  • Secure data management and trusted research environments
  • Data management policies
  • Working with sensitive (e.g. medical) data
Research Computing Infrastructure
  • High Performance Computing cluster design and deployment
  • Support for specialist workloads such as AI, traditional HPC or high-throughput computing
  • Managing on-premise, cloud-based and hybrid resources
  • Data storage infrastructure
  • Deploying / managing Trusted Research Environments
  • Building and sustaining teams of infrastructure professionals
  • Training and skills for research computing infrastructure professionals
  • HPC careers
General / cross-dRTP topics
  • Equity, Diversity and Inclusion within research technical communities
  • Experiences from building and running local or regional dRTP communities
  • Training for dRTPs including developing training pathways and curricula
  • dRTP careers and supporting structures within universities and research organisations
  • Supporting reproducibility of research outputs

Publication

Workshop submissions will not be formally published but accepted abstracts will be made available on the website.

We also strongly encourage you to submit your presentation slides to a platform such as Zenodo in order to obtain a DOI for your presentation. We will then link to this from the workshop agenda.

Abstract preparation guidance

Abstracts are being accepted for the following submission types:

  • Regular talks: 15 minutes, plus 5 minutes for questions – up to 300 word abstract

  • Lightning talks: 5 minutes – up to 200 word abstract

  • Posters: A1 poster plus a 2-minute poster introduction lightning talk – up to 200 word abstract

We ask that you cover the following points in your abstract:
  • An overview of the topic or piece of work that your presentation/poster will cover
  • How this submission will develop the skills/knowledge/understanding of the attendees or start discussion on an important topic
  • Why you feel the submission will be of interest to the workshop attendees

Submit your abstract via EasyChair

Abstract review and further information

Abstracts will be reviewed by members of our programme committee.

Reviews are undertaken anonymously – details of abstract submitters (including names/affiliations) are not provided to reviewers, they will receive only the abstract text. However, please be aware that abstract text will not be anonymised – it will be provided to reviewers as submitted. You are therefore advised, where possible, to avoid including identifying information in your abstract submissions.

We are committed to promoting and supporting diversity within the dRTP community and strongly encourage submissions by individuals from underrepresented groups in this field.

We are also keen that the STEP-UP RSLondon 2025 Conference provides a forum for people who are new to the RSE/dRTP field and/or not regular attendees of academic-style conferences. As such, we encourage submissions from people who are new to or inexperienced at presenting. There is support/mentoring available if you are new to presenting your work – please contact the workshop team at info@step-up.ac.uk if you would like to make use of this support.

The workshop aims to provide as many opportunities as possible for people to present their work and ideas. The review process will be used to ensure that submissions are within scope and cover material that is relevant and likely to be of interest to the workshop attendees. We anticipate significantly more submissions than we have space to accommodate at the event and the programme committee/workshop team will manage the selection of presentations and posters to ensure these aims are supported.

Note that where we are unable to accept talks due to limited capacity within the workshop schedule, we may offer the opportunity to present the submission in an alternative format, e.g. as a lightning talk or poster.