The submission of software as a research output is becoming more common. As a result a number of area need addressing and improving in the research life cycle of a software project.
The benefits to the scientific systems can be that experiments using software can be replicated and built upon more easily, and secondly research in the area of software development discovery and reuse is aided.
Free and Open Source software has for a long time has been organised as a gift economy and attribution has been part of the culture of rewards and recognition.
Advanced software maintenance systems make use of version control systems and dependency management. The result of these two types of technology results in the ability to have any version in a software's release history being automatically available and be able to run where applicable. With the additions such as 'continuous integration' software can be validated to be in good working order and so ensure it is fit to be use. In the not too distant future it the technical working environment for software making can mean that greater sustainability can be achieved, example are a project like Binder to republish Jupyter notebooks https://mybinder.org
In this editorial theme
- A key issue is discovery and evaluation. Researchers need more information about software used in experiments, and to have access to the source code to be able to access and run the software cited.
- For software maintainers guidance is needed about what core metadata needs to be stored with the software in a similar way to
Currently how to cite software is not clear or technically resolved, and secondly the documentation of basic information (metadata) that a software maker should provide is also not clearly defined so that researchers looking to use published works do not have enough information to act on.
Guidance is needed on both issues and we can engage with key players working on these problems.
Editorial evaluation
#Questions 1. needs 3. improving systems
#Editorial 1. empowering 2. discourse 3. bottom-up 5. replicable models
#Brand 3. gender equality 4. co-creation
#Strategy 1. three channel
#Audience 1. career 2. engaged
Note: Blog comparators are not carrying stories on this topic (3.18 SW)
How to break the topic down
- How to record information to describe a software project and its contributors
- Projects going on to create systems for software citation: to record, to read, to collect, etc. Get input from different projects. What are their research questions/interim findings. We have CodeMeta, CFF, CiteAs.
- What information do journals and repositories want when submitting software
- How can citing be more useful for researchers. Is there enough information to be useful for research publication/software readers/users
- The Future: Can software cited be fully available in a – validated, CI, packet managed, dependency managed, virtualised way – so that it can be retrieved or run live. e.g, Jupyter https://jupyter.org/ and Binder to republish https://mybinder.org
- Note: we need clear guidelines or pointers to this info, for: software makers, journal submissions of software, and academic writers of scholarly literature wanting to cite software.
- Top three info sources in each area: journals, papers, software citation software project, working groups and organisations
Community: to engage
- #oscibar https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/oscibar2018_session10
- Zenodo
- CodeMeta https://github.com/codemeta/codemeta
- CFF Citation File Format https://citation-file-format.github.io/
- CiteAs http://citeas.org/about http://impactstory.org/
- Force11 working group running through https://github.com/force11/force11-sciwg/
- Wikidata
- Software Heritage
- Katrin Leinweber TIB - Software Carpentry
- de-RSE (Research Software Engineers) Group (German group): http://www.de-rse.org/en/
- Software Heritage
- Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE) https://twitter.com/WSSSPE
Literature and projects (Zotero)
https://www.zotero.org/groups/1838445/o-s/items/tag/software-cite
Key resources
2016 Force11 working group running through Dec' 18. Group https://www.force11.org/software-citation-principles Article https://peerj.com/articles/cs-86/
2018 Nature Software Submission Guidelines’, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-02741-4
Citation
- Theme announce: possibly we announce themes?
- Blog: Open Science Barcamp – report on software citation by moderator, Sophia Doerner sophia.doerner@hu-berlin.de
- Blog: Software Citation 'How-to' article and follow on forum – Katrin Leinweber TIB, title: Concrete advice for more sustainable scientific software projects. On private TIB Git https://git.tib.eu/leinweberk/FAIR-Data-Prinzipien-auf-Software-anwenden
- Forum/how-tos: The Software Citation community - get them onto the forum to help move things forward. I now have the contacts and literature from #OSBarcamp
- Blog/ resource: someone could give the top 3 lit, journals, projects, citation managers to use: Literature and projects (provisional) https://www.zotero.org/groups/1838445/o-s/items/tag/software-cite
- FOSTER group report
- Project: CFF Citation File Format
- Project: CodeMeta
- Project: CiteAs
- Re-use and journals. Blog. How software is described and documented so that its citation can be of use to future practitioners and readers of research publications. e.g. 2018 Nature Software Submission Guidelines’, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-02741-4
Issues and questions:
Lobby OpenAIRE to include software. Currently OpenAIRE policy is not to include it – forum issue
The Future?
Discover and run scientific code, Code Ocean https://codeocean.com/
Simulations in the browser, Jupyter https://jupyter.org/ and Binder to republish https://mybinder.org
Continuos Integration and validation, with dependencies and full contributor audit
Create a grid for the theme
To include: timeline, issues, keywords, who to name check, questions to ask.
Contacts
See software cite theme contacts