Best Practices for Software Registries and Repositories
Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran, Alice Allen, Allen Lee, Daniel Garijo, Thomas Morrell, SciCodes Consortium • August 4, 2021
(This post is cross-posted on the SciCodes website, the SSI blog, the ASCL blog, and the FORCE11 blog.)
Software is a fundamental element of the scientific process, and cataloguing scientific software is helpful to enable software discoverability. During the years 2019-2020, the Task Force on Best Practices for Software Registries of the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group worked to create Nine Best Practices for Scientific Software Registries and Repositories. In this post, we explain why scientific software registries and repositories are important, why we wanted to create a list of best practices for such registries and repositories, the process we followed, what the best practices include, and what the next steps for this community are.
Evidence for the importance of research software
Michelle Barker, Daniel S. Katz, Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran • June 8, 2020
(This post is cross-posted on the SSI blog and the Netherlands eScience Center blog, and is archived as https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3873832)
This blog analyses work evidencing the importance of research software to research outcomes, to enable the research software community to find useful evidence to share with key influencers. This analysis considers papers relating to meta-research, policy, community, education and training, research breakthroughs and specific software.
The Research Software Alliance (ReSA) Taskforce for the importance of research software was formed initially to bring together existing evidence showing the importance of research software in the research process. This kind of information is critical to achieving ReSA’s vision to have research software recognised and valued as a fundamental and vital component of research worldwide.
Scientific Software Projects and Their Communities
Rene Gassmoeller • March 24, 2020
(This post is cross-posted on the BSSw blog.)
In the past several years, we have seen a growing consensus that improving the state of scientific software requires focusing on the people behind the software. This is particularly true for the software engineers and scientists developing the software and for the maintainers and leaders of projects, but also for whole projects improving their software development processes. These people are not just individuals, however; when they work together on a software project, they form a community. We have learned a lot about user/developer communities from open-source software projects (see opensource.guide), yet we know relatively little about the challenges that are specific to scientific software.
The Research Software Alliance (ReSA) and the Community Landscape
Daniel S. Katz, Michelle Barker, Paula Andrea Martinez, Hartwig Anzt, Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran, and Tom Bakker • March 11, 2020
(This post is cross-posted on the SSI blog and the Netherlands eScience Center blog, and is archived as https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3699949)
ReSA’s mission is to bring research software communities together to collaborate on the advancement of research software. Its vision is to have research software recognized and valued as a fundamental and vital component of research worldwide. Given our mission, there are multiple reasons that it’s important for us to understand the landscape of communities that are involved with software, in aspects such as preservation, citation, career paths, productivity, and sustainability. One of these reasons is that ReSA seeks to be a link between these communities, which requires identifying and understanding them. We want to be sure that there aren’t significant community organizations that we don’t know about to involve in our work. Also, identifying where there are gaps will help us create the opportunities and communities of practices as required.
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