This year’s STEP-UP RSLondon community conference, the 7th edition of the conference (formerly the RSLondonSouthEast workshop), builds on last year’s successful event where we broadened the scope of the conference to support the 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 dRTPs working with research software, research data and research 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).

We are accepting abstract submissions for regular and lightning talks as well as posters, across three tracks covering research software, research data and research computing infrastructure.

Submit an abstract

Taking place on Monday 29th June 2026, this year’s event will again include, in addition to plenary sessions, three parallel tracks focused 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, please submit to the track that you consider is the closest match to your topic and include a note in your abstract that you think your topic has wider relevance across the dRTP community and would like to have it scheduled in a plenary session. We will look to schedule submissions on more general topics within a plenary session where possible. Please note that 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 sufficient 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 (A1 size)

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 Tuesday 14th April 2026
  • Notification of acceptance: Tuesday 19th May 2026
  • Conference registration closes: Friday 12th June 2026

Call themes

Over the last year we have seen the profile of digital Research Technical Professionals grow further and the “dRTP” term being used more widely within the UK community and beyond. In this context, we have two core themes for this year’s workshop and particularly welcome submissions that align with these themes. Firstly:

  • Developing effective career pathways for dRTPs (from entry-level to senior leadership level)

As the profile of dRTPs grows, we need the institutions and organisations who host them to recognise the value that people in these roles bring to research and teaching, and to provide career pathways that support career progression from entry-level roles right through to the most senior grades within the organisation.

We are also seeing increasing concern, both among people who write code, and among people in other technical roles, about the rise of AI, in partcular LLMs, and how this might affect their roles in the future. In this context, our second theme for the conference is:

  • Working with research software, data and infrastructure in the age of the Large Language Model (LLM)

In the same way that programming has progressed from toggling switches to set binary data or opcodes on a computer, to the high-level, interpreted languages of today, many dRTPs see advances in AI and LLMs as simply the next step in a process that provides them with increasingly high-level and more powerful tools and interfaces to optimise their productivity. At the same time, there are many dRTPs who are genuinely concerned about how their roles will have changed, or whether they’ll even still exist, in 5 or more years time.

These themes will represent two key areas for discussion at the conference.

Topics

Alongside the core themes highlighted above, we invite the submission of abstracts covering all aspects of Research Software Engineering, research data and research computing infrastructure / High Performance Computing, including, but not limited to:

Research Software
  • Open source software development
  • AI-assisted coding and testing
  • Software development best practices, including testing, CI/CD, code review and software project management
  • Application of research software skills to novel research challenges
  • RSE career structures and pathways
  • Training and skills development activities for RSEs
  • Building/growing/running RSE groups and teams
Research Data
  • Data stewardship
  • Research data management processes and infrastructure
  • Trusted Research Environments and secure/sensitive data
  • Open data and licensing
  • Leveraging AI in the research data domain
  • Data management policies
  • Data repositories
Research Computing Infrastructure / HPC
  • High Performance Computing cluster design
  • AI infrastructure deployment and maintenance
  • Supporting specialist workloads such as AI models/inference and communication-intensive parallel codes.
  • Cloud-based research computing HPC infrastructure
  • Career pathways and roles for research computing infrastructure professionals
  • Research computing infrastructure training
  • Open source tooling for HPC infrastructure management
  • Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility in dRTP communities
  • Building and running dRTP communities
  • Open research and Team Science
  • Supporting sustainability and reproducibility of research outputs

Publication

Conference 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

  • Posters: A1 poster plus a 2-minute poster introduction lightning talk – up to 300 word abstract

  • Lightning talks: 5 minutes – 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 2026 Conference provides a forum for people who are new to the 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 regular talk or lightning talk submissions 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.