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
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.
#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
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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
Lobby OpenAIRE to include software. Currently OpenAIRE policy is not to include it – forum issue
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
To include: timeline, issues, keywords, who to name check, questions to ask.
See software cite theme contacts