Research Software vs. Research Data II: Protocols for Research Data dissemination and evaluation in the Open Science context

Abstract

Background: Open Science seeks to render research outputs visible, accessible and reusable. In this context, Research Data and Research Software sharing and dissemination issues provide real challenges to the scientific community, as consequence of recent progress in political, legal and funding requirements. Methods: We take advantage from the approach we have developed in a precedent publication, in which we have highlighted the similarities between the Research Data and Research Software definitions. Results: The similarities between Research Data and Research Software definitions can be extended to propose protocols for Research Data dissemination and evaluation derived from those already proposed for Research Software dissemination and evaluation. We also analyze FAIR principles for these outputs. Conclusions: Our proposals here provide concrete instructions for Research Data and Research Software producers to make them more findable and accessible, as well as arguments to choose suitable dissemination platforms to complete the FAIR framework. Future work could analyze the potential extension of this parallelism to other kinds of research outputs that are disseminated under similar conditions to those of Research Data and Research Software, that is, without widely accepted publication procedures involving editors or other external actors and where the dissemination is usually restricted through the hands of the production team.

Data management strategy for a collaborative research center

“…In addition to contributing datasets to repositories, sharing other relevant information such as experimental protocols, source code, and research software used for processing or analyzing these datasets is essential for reproducing research findings [ 243 ]. This approach can complement existing efforts to standardize complete datasets and to facilitate contributions to repositories.…”

Research Software vs. Research Data I: Towards a Research Data definition in the Open Science context

“…Logiciel: Ensemble des programmes, procédés et règles, et éventuellement de la documentation, relatifs au fonctionnement d'un ensemble de traitement de données (en anglais: software) 13 .…”

“…[…] it can also include its preparatory documentation. 13 Software: All programs, procedures and rules, and possibly documentation, related to the performance of some data processing (in English: software). 14 Software, including the preparatory material, is considered as works protected by the present code.…”