Punch up the introduction

[karthik]

Software pervades all parts of modern scientific research, including data analysis and inference as well as computational science. Recent surveys in the US and UK show that 90-95% of researchers rely on research software, and 63-70% of them cannot continue their work if these software were to stop functioning (Hettrick et al., 2014). Much of this software is developed by researchers for researchers, as the contemporary scientific process demands the development of new methods in tandem with the demands of new discoveries and fields. However, despite its importance, a large proportion of research software is developed in an ad hoc manner, with little regard for the high standards that are characteristic of other research activities. As a result, the research software ecosystem is fragile and the source of numerous problems that plague modern computational science (Carver et al., 2018).

P7 para 1: Personally, I think you could be a bit more bombastic in the opening paragraph to hammer the point home from the very beginning. It currently feels a bit like the software problem is an issue of research interest, rather than an existential threat to the results generated by almost all researchers which could make worthless the majority of current research funding.

Same paragraph: Do you feel confident enough to transform some of the percentages in this paragraph into numbers of researchers (even if it’s dressed up in language like “this means there could be as many as X,000 researchers in the US whose work would be impossible without software”)? Percentages can be a bit impersonal, thousands of researchers are not.

[karthik]

I'll leave this issue open for now because I don't have an idea of how to estimate number of researchers and transform percentages to people.