From FAIR research data toward FAIR and open research software

Abstract

The Open Science agenda holds that science advances faster when we can build on existing results. Therefore, research data must be FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) in order to advance the findability, reproducibility and reuse of research results. Besides the research data, all the processing steps on these data – as basis of scientific publications – have to be available, too.For good scientific practice, the resulting research software should be both open and adhere to the FAIR principles to allow full repeatability, reproducibility, and reuse. As compared to research data, research software should be both archived for reproducibility and actively maintained for reusability.The FAIR data principles do not require openness, but research software should be open source software. Established open source software licenses provide sufficient licensing options, such that it should be the rare exception to keep research software closed.We review and analyze the current state in this area in order to give recommendations for making research software FAIR and open.

Beyond ecosystem modeling: A roadmap to community cyberinfrastructure for ecological data‐model integration

“…• Findability refers to the ease with which permanent records of the key metadata about each model-data activity and computational output can be found (Hasselbring et al, 2020). Recording the full, transparent history of an analysis to enable findability is F I G U R E 1 Schematic of a community cyberinfrastructure example and summary of recommendations (numbers in the green boxes refer to our recommendations in the main text).…”

An environment for sustainable research software in Germany and beyond: current state, open challenges, and call for action

“…Sustainability of research software should be considered from the beginning for new projects. The criteria listed below, or a subset such as the “good enough” practices proposed by Wilson et al 43 and artifact review approaches 58 , 59 , are valuable throughout the development process (including early phases) for almost all types of research software applications. “Classical” research funding schemes should acknowledge the need to follow best practices during the development of new software and allow factoring in appropriate resources to design and implement for sustainability.…”

Gütekriterien und Handlungsempfehlungen für die Entwicklung von Forschungssoftware in der Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft

“…Zentral diskutierte Kriterien sind dabei erneut die Replizierbarkeit sowie insbesondere die Transparenz. Ferner sehen auch die im Auftrag der Europäischen Kommission erarbeiteten "FAIR"-Prinzipien (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) akademischer Erzeugnisse insbesondere Transparenz, Replizierbarkeit und Nachhaltigkeit vor (Almeida et al, 2017;Hasselbring et al, 2020;Mons et al, 2017).…”

“…B. Docker) oder entsprechende Konfigurationsdateien (z. B. Makefile, requirements.txt) spezifizieren oder gar emulieren (Hasselbring et al, 2020;van Atteveldt et al, 2019).…”