Progress in scientific research is dependent on the quality and accessibility of research software at all levels. It is now critical to address many new challenges related to the development, deployment, maintenance, and sustainability of open-use research software: the software upon which specific research results rely. Open-use software means that the software is widely accessible (whether open source, shareware, or commercial). Research software means that the choice of software is essential to specific research results; using different software could produce different results. In addition, it is essential that scientists, researchers, and students are able to learn and adopt a new set of software-related skills and methodologies. Established researchers are already acquiring some of these skills, and in particular, a specialized class of software developers is emerging in academic environments who are an integral and embedded part of successful research teams. WSSSPE provides a forum for discussion of these challenges, including both positions and experiences, and a forum for the community to assemble and act. WSSSPE4 will consist of two separate tracks with some joint sessions:

Track 1 – Building a sustainable future for open-use research software has the goals of defining a vision of the future of open-use research software, and in the workshop, initiating the activities that are needed to get there. The idea of this track is to first think about where we want to be 5 to 10 years from now, without being too concerned with where we are today, and then to determine how we can move to this future.

Track 2 – Practices & experiences in sustainable scientific software has the goal of improving the quality of today’s research software and the experiences of its developers by
sharing practices and experiences. This track is focused on the current state of scientific software and what we can do to improve it in the short term, starting with where we are today.

***Topics of interest include but are not limited to***

* Development and Community
- Best practices for developing sustainable software
- Models for funding specialist expertise in software collaborations
- Software tools that aid sustainability
- Academia/industry interaction
- Refactoring/improving legacy scientific software
- Engineering design for sustainable software
- Metrics for the success of scientific software
- Adaptation of mainstream software practices for scientific software
* Professionalization
- Career paths
- RSE as a brand
- RSE outside of the UK or Europe
- Increase incentives in publishing, funding and promotion for better software
* Training
- Training for developing sustainable software
- Curriculum for software sustainability
* Credit
- Making the existing credit and citation ecosystem work better for software
- Future credit and citation ecosystem
- Software contributions as a part of tenure review
- Case studies of receiving credit for software contributions
- Awards and recognition that encourage sustainable software
* Software publishing
- Journals and alternative venues for publishing software
- Review processes for published software
* Software discoverability/reuse
- Proposals and case studies
* Reproducibility and testing
- Reproducibility in conferences and journals
- Best practices for code testing and code review

***Important Dates***
- Submission of lightning talks: July 10, 2016
- Submission of Track 1 idea papers: July 10, 2016
- Submission of Track 2 position papers, experience papers, presentations of previously published works, and demos: July 10, 2016
- Submission of travel support requests: July 10, 2016
- Lightning talk decisions announced: Aug 1, 2016
- Track 1 idea papers decisions announced: Aug 1, 2016
- Track 2 position papers, experience papers, presentations of previously published works, and demo decisions announced: Aug 1, 2016
- Travel support decisions announced: Aug 2, 2016

***Submission types and formats***

Please see http://wssspe.researchcomputing.org.uk/wssspe4/submissions/ for details

***Submission process***

All submissions should be created in PDF format. They should begin with a title, author names and affiliations, a short abstract, then the body of the submission. The title should begin with “Lightning talk:” or “Position paper:” or “Experience paper:” or “Idea paper:” or “Previously published:” or “Demo:”. Submissions should also include a statement of their license, preferably CC BY 4.0. Submissions should be made via https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wssspe4.

WSSSPE4 accepted submissions (except presentations of previously published work) will be published by WSSSPE as a special collection in CEUR (http://ceur-ws.org/). Authors retain copyright to their work and are free to self-publish their submissions or accepted papers elsewhere in addition.

***Organizing Committee***

* Gabrielle Allen, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
* Jeffrey Carver, University of Alabama, USA
* Sou-Cheng T. Choi, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA
* Tom Crick, Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK
* Michael R. Crusoe, Common Workflow Language project
* Sandra Gesing, University of Notre Dame, USA
* Robert Haines, University of Manchester, UK
* Michael Heroux, Sandia National Laboratory, USA
* Lorraine J. Hwang, University of California, Davis, USA
* Daniel S. Katz, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
* Kyle E. Niemeyer, Oregon State University, USA
* Manish Parashar, Rutgers University, USA
* Colin C. Venters, University of Huddersfield, UK