Hi Simon

A good place to start is the funding bodies, RCUL, Wellcome Trust, Royal Society. They may be persuaded to send out a call for feedback or a survey to all their funded researchers. Another way is through the STEM Ambassador scheme (STEMNET) although this will only it those involved in public engagement, but they have put info in newsletters for me before. 

I hope that gets you started I am sure others will have more ideas.

Emma

On 15 October 2014 15:14, Simon Hettrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hello,

How do you contact "the research community"?

There doesn't appear to be any way of contacting the majority of people who work in universities conducting research (and there's about 250,000 of them according to HESA).

I am trying to get people to sign up to a campaign that will shed some much needed light on the role of software in research. Here's a number: £760 million - the lower bound of the money spent last year by the Research Councils on software-reliant projects. Only a few million was spent on making sure that the software worked properly and could be shared.

In addition to being a thinly veiled attempt at getting people to help me send the message out, this is a genuine question! Do people have a preferred way of contacting a large swathe of the research community?

And if you do want to help...

The campaign is here: http://bit.ly/SoftwareIsFundamental

There's an eminently re-tweetable tweet here: https://twitter.com/SoftwareSaved/status/522325490754154497

Regards,

Simon.

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Simon Hettrick
Deputy Director
The Software Sustainability Institute
+44 (0) 2380 598871
@SoftwareSaved
http://www.software.ac.uk/blog

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Emma Newall

Nuffield Research Placement Regional Coordinator, London
Science Communication and Education Consultant, Charles Darwin Trust
07944 429886