-
Opening day
-
Submission deadline
deRSE26 Final Call for Contributions
deRSE26, the sixth German Conference on Research Software Engineering will be held at University of Stuttgart on 03.-05. March 2026. As a venue for the diverse community of people concerned with research software, it values contributions from all levels of experience and across scientific disciplines, geographic locations, genders, and ethnicities. The organising committee invites submissions for talks, posters, and demos, as well as interactive formats like tutorials, workshops, meet-ups and hackathons. We aim for a well-balanced programme that includes a wide variety of perspectives to reflect the diversity of the RSE community and its activities, emphasising that software can be a language that furthers communication across the established domain boundaries.
Interested to contribute? Please read further for more details.
Topics
deRSE26 is open to all topics related to research software engineering (RSE). The thematic groupings are not intended to imply final track decisions but rather to facilitate community engagement and feedback
and a first classification for reviewing contributions. At deRSE26 the final program will still be created inductively from your contributions.
- Research Software Craftsmanship
- Best practices for research software development
- Software Engineering, Project planning, project management in Research Software
- RSE education
- Research Software usability and support
- Research Software sustainability and management plans
- Research Software Metadata
- Emerging Computing & Infrastructure
- Cloud technologies and distributed systems
- Computing architectures
- Heterogeneous Hardware
- High-performance computing (HPC)
- Infrastructures for scientific computing
- Open Science & Collaboration
- Open source research software, licensing, and distribution
- Reproducibility: of performance, of results (including artificial intelligence)
- Research Data management and NFDI
- Data Analysis, AI, and Domain Applications
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning in a research context
- Computational workflows
- Data visualisation and analysis
- Digital humanities & computational archaeology
- Domain-specific languages
- Community, Policy, & Career Development
- Careers for research software developers
- Strategies for Diverse and Inclusive Research Software Development
- Funding for RSE work
- Local RSE related organisations
- Policies and legal frameworks
- Cross-Disciplinary Advancement
- Digital literacy in research
- RSE Research
- research software in fostering peace, avoiding and resolving conflicts
In short, if your contribution addresses a topic that you think is of interest to the community of people concerned with research software, we would love to see it submitted!
Formats
deRSE26 is open to different types of contributions.
We have the traditional formats:
Talks are a traditional format of presenting work at a conference. Talks at deRSE26 have a length of 20 minutes (including time for Q&A and discussion) to be divided between the presentation (minimum 10 minutes) and Q&A and discussion (minimum 5 minutes). If your talk is accepted, you will be notified about the length of the talk by the session chair.
Posters are used to present an overview of an idea, a project, a collaboration, etc. in compact form. Posters must be in portrait orientation and maximally up to A0 size (max. height: 1189mm; max. width: 841mm). Please be prepared to give a very short presentation about the contents of your poster in a “lightning talk”. This will help attendees of the poster session identify the posters and people they want to look at and talk to. There will also be a poster award determined by the deRSE26 participants.
Demos: As an alternative to a printed poster you can demonstrate your contribution to a small group of people during the poster session.
You will get a table and some space around it. This is especially suitable when you want to show new features or specific behaviour of software.
And we offer more interactive and collaborative formats. Note that in autumn of 2026 there will be another collaborative conference happening.
This will mean that selection processes for workshops, tutorial, skill-ups, BoFs and hackathons will be more restrictive and require you to argue, why you need to hold your contribution at deRSE26!
Tutorials or Skill-Ups are meant to give participants the opportunity to acquire new knowledge or practical skills on a specific topic. Depending on the content, they can last between 30 minutes and half a day.
Workshops and Hackathons are formats to work together on concrete topics for a set period of time. They typically have some expected output, for hackathons, this is often in the form of some piece of software or code. Depending on the content, they can last between 30 minutes and a full day.
Meet-ups provide an opportunity to convene your community. BOFs are unstructured formats to bring together people with shared interests around a topic and can be used to initiate new communities. Depending on the content, they can last between 30 minutes and half a day.
Please use the submission field to specify your time and location requirements, or if you have further special requirements. But please be aware, that time and space resources are limited, meaning we might not be able to accomodate your requirements fully.
Do you have yet another format in mind? Please feel free to reach out to the organisers (derse26-program-committee@listserv.dfn.de) to discuss your idea!
Who should submit?
We welcome submissions from any and all people who have an interesting take on research software development, including:
- Researchers at any career stage who develop software for research purposes
- Software developers working in a research context, whatever their job title or field
- Funders and decision-makers paving the way for sustainable research software with grants and other instruments
- Those interested in advancing the understanding of how best to use and maintain research software, e.g. with respect to openness, reproducibility, sustainability or scalability and performance
People from any organisation providing tools, platforms, or services that benefit research software, such as IT infrastructure providers or computing and data centres. - You are from industry? No problem! We highly value your viewpoint onto this developing field and are interested in your contributions.
We are not just looking for seasoned presenters or people who are already well-known. Thus, speakers from underrepresented backgrounds and at early career stages are highly encouraged to submit a proposal.
First-time presenter?
We want you to present! It is important that the program includes people who do not normally publish papers, or give talks at academic conferences. We want your voice to be heard as part of the RSE community.
It is not intimidating! deRSE26 is about learning from each other in a supportive atmosphere. Your perspective is welcome and needed, and presenting will be a great chance to start a wider discussion of issues you care about.
We can help! We offer mentoring and other support with preparing your presentation. Please email us if you require advice or clarification before making a submission. We offer one-on-one mentoring to help successful applicants prepare their talk, poster, or workshop.
If you would like a mentor to help you just tick the respective box when submitting your proposal/registration.
Submission
No matter what format of contribution you go for, please describe it as precisely as possible in a short abstract (500 words max!). The abstract can be written in German or English.
Submit your abstract through the Indico conference management system hosted by DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron). You log in to Indico with Helmholtz ID using your home institution credentials or as a fallback, a login from ORCID, Github, or Google can be performed.
The form includes a field for the description of your submission (“abstract”) and further details.
Mind that submitting a contribution does not automatically register you for the conference, so please remember to register for participation on time.
We will select talks and workshops through a single-blind review process, i.e., reviewers will see authors’ names and affiliations.
This supports software-related submissions better than a double-blind process.
Young RSE Prize
If your RSE career just has started (e.g. if your PhD or Master's thesis is from 2023 or later), you can participate for the Young RSE Prize 2026.
Only talks qualify for participation and you have to indicate your participation in this award during the submission. The speaker has to be the youngRSE contestant. If you don't fulfill the numerical requirements from above utilize the comment field for your submission, to argue for your participation. The Programm Committee will indicate their decision in due time. Winners will be announced at the conference and receive a small prize.
Poster Prize
There will be a poster prize awarded that is determined by the community by popular vote. All presented posters automatically take part in it.
Post-Conference Proceedings
We plan to publish a post-conference proceedings volume on the deRSE26 conference. Contributors to deRSE26 will after the conference be invited to submit a journal-length version of their contribution to this volume.
Submissions will be peer-reviewed and, if accepted, published in the open-access journal ECEASST at no cost to the authors.
Timeline
September 22, 2025 - We are open for submissions
October 26, 2025 - Deadline for submissions
December 14, 2025 - Notification of acceptance, preliminary program
TBA - Open registration for the conference
March 03-05, 2026 - deRSE26 conference
If your submission is accepted, at least one of the authors is expected to attend the conference in person to present.
Please note that conference fees apply at registration, also for speakers.
Contact
If you have any questions about the conference or the submission process, please do not hesitate to contact the conference organisers at derse26@listserv.dfn.de.
