Neil Chue Hong comments on rewarding researchers' code for Nature

Description

Expert comment about recognition for software developers in academia, around the launch of the Depsy tool. Interview given to article commissioned be Nature, picked up by other news outlets across the world.

Such a tool is needed, notes Neil Chue Hong, founding director of the Software Sustainability Institute in Edinburgh, UK, because there are few ways to credit scientists for their software. Young researchers are enthusiastic about coding, he says. Last year, he ran a survey of 1,000 randomly selected UK scientists, which suggested that more than 50% of researchers develop their own code. Even so, few UK academics listed code or software as one of their research outputs in the nation’s latest research quality audit (the ‘Research Excellence Framework’) even in disciplines such as computer science that rely heavily on software. “There is a culture that reinforces the idea that producing and publishing code has no perceived benefit to the researcher,” Hong says.