CANARIE opens new competition for reusable software with 2x funding

CANARIE has announced a second round of competition for projects around reusable software after its pilot program was well received by the research community. This time, $4.5 million in funding is available, more than double awarded in the pilot round.

The funding supports CANARIE’s aim of encouraging research teams to develop and maintain software that can be adapted by other research teams, hopefully across disciplines. The program helps CANARIE promote efficient use of research resources. Instead of teams focusing on developing software or even duplicating software developed by other teams, researchers can spend more time working on their core task – conducting research.

CANARIE last year tried this concept of encouraging the reuse of research software packages (called research platforms) with the help of $2 million in funds. Last September, CANARIE announced five successfully funded projects (R$, October 2017) in different disciplines – from basic science to humanities and the arts.

“This further reinforces our vision that rather than having to continue to develop new software platforms for each project, a lot of that software can be reused, and there’s a lot of value in reusing software. It contributes not only to collaboration across disciplines and research teams, but it also leads to more efficient use of research funds,” says Ela Yazdani, CANARIE’s director for communications.

Scott Henwood, director for Research Software at CANARIE, tells RE$EARCH MONEY that for the pilot launched last year, CANARIE wasn’t sure how the research community would accept the reuse paradigm. But he says the response was positive so CANARIE is allocating more money into the program so that they can fund more projects and help more researchers.

“For this call, we are concentrating on the reuse of existing software,” he says, meaning, the funds are being made available to platforms to be modified and maintained.

The funds are open to research platforms that may or may not be previously funded by previous CANARIE research awards. Research teams must help onboard at least one new research team on the use of the software platform.

Awards are capped at $225,000 and are good for modifying existing platforms to be adapted by another research team and for software maintenance, such as bug fixes, enhancements, new features and some tweaks based on user feedback. The maximum funding period is up to 12 months for the software modifications but for maintenance, the funding period is good up to 15 months or up to September 30, 2020. Start of software development is on July 1, 2018 and maintenance starts on July 1, 2019.

“We discovered in the last call that there were some platforms which didn’t require that much development money. That is why we’re decreasing the amount of development money in this call in favour of funding more projects,” adds Henwood.

“Software use has traditionally been used …by researchers in fields such as biochemistry, etc. Now, we’re seeing a lot of activities from other researchers – the humanities, for example, who are able to use the same software. It’s interesting, it’s going to be beneficial for that (research) community as well,” adds Yazdani.

Proposals are due in March 2018.  Since the launch of CANARIE’s research software program in 2007, more than 100 projects have been funded.

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