Research software is a fundamental and vital part of research, yet significant challenges to discoverability, productivity, quality, reproducibility, and sustainability exist. Improving the practice of scholarship is a common goal of the open science, open source, and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) communities and research software is now being understood as a type of digital object to which FAIR should be applied. This emergence reflects a maturation of the research community to better understand the crucial role of FAIR research software in maximising research value. The FAIR for Research Software (FAIR4RS) Working Group has adapted the FAIR Guiding Principles to create the FAIR Principles for Research Software (FAIR4RS Principles). The contents and context of the FAIR4RS Principles are summarised here to provide the basis for discussion of their adoption. Examples of implementation by organisations are provided to share information on how to maximise the value of research outputs, and to encourage others to amplify the importance and impact of this work.

Software is increasingly essential in most research, and much of this software is developed specifically for and during research. To make this research software findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR), we need to define exactly what FAIR means for research software and acknowledge that software is a living and complex object for which it is impossible to propose one solution that fits all software.

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Among the entities involved in software citation, software source code requires special attention, due to the role it plays in ensuring scientific reproducibility. To reference source code we need identifiers that are not only unique and persistent, but also support integrity checking intrinsically. Suitable identifiers must guarantee that denoted objects will always stay the same, without relying on external third parties and administrative processes.We analyze the role of identifiers for digital objects (IDOs), whose properties are different from, and complementary to, those of the various digital identifiers of objects (DIOs) that are today popular building blocks of software and data citation toolchains.We argue that both kinds of identifiers are needed and detail the syntax, semantics, and practical implementation of the persistent identifiers (PIDs) adopted by the Software Heritage project to reference billions of software source code artifacts such as source code files, directories, and commits.

Software has become an indissociable support of technical and scientific knowledge. The preservation of this universal body of knowledge is as essential as preserving research articles and data sets. In the quest to make scientific results reproducible, and pass knowledge to future generations, we must preserve these three main pillars:  research articles that describe the results, the data sets used or produced, and the software that embodies the logic of the data transformation. The collaboration between Software Heritage (SWH), the Center for Direct Scientific Communication (CCSD) and the scientific and technical information services (IES) of The French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (Inria) has resulted in a specified moderation and curation workflow for research software artifacts deposited in the HAL the French global open access repository. The curation workflow was developed to help digital librarians and archivists handle this new and peculiar artifact - software source code. While implementing the workflow, a set of guidelines has emerged from the challenges and the solutions put in place to help all actors involved in the process.