Simon Worthington, editor, Generation R, April 2018, TIB. Theme to initially run over May 2018 and then periodically updated.
The submission of software as a research output is becoming more common. As a result a number of area need addressing and improving in research workflows, and in the research life cycle of a software projects.
Two areas are important for this theme of 'software citation' in terms of our editorial remit of taking a 'needs based approach to researchers', these are the use of software and the development of software.
The benefits to the scientific systems can be that experiment using software can be replicated and built upon more easily, and in addition research in the area of software development can be helped by increased discovery and reuse.
The relationship of researchers to research software can be characterized as transitory or 'on-off' and is compounded by the accelerated development life cycles: a researcher might only briefly use a tool, research software R&D funding is quite often time limited, and in the end the life cycle of a software system is also limited.
In this editorial theme of 'software citation' we want to look at what initiatives and project are working on these issues of software citation and improving the reuse of software. We also want to look practical steps that a variety of users and public institutions can take to improve their systems for software citation.
Our theme are run over a flexible time period, but as default for three weeks, and then periodically we will revisit a theme. Our editorial approach is to support the Open Science community in its ongoing work in a given area. We do this by carrying short blog posts, engaging in discourse and support on our own forum and on social media, as well as carrying resource documentation, as collaborative documents on key sources and how-tos if needed.
Advanced software maintenance systems make use of version control systems and dependency management. The result of these two types of technologies 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. Building on these technologies, in the not too distant future the working environment for software making can mean that greater sustainability can be achieved, example are a project like Binder for republish Jupyter notebooks https://mybinder.org
A collaborative bibliography on software citation 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
FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI) San Diego teaching july-aug 18 https://www.force11.org/fsci
To include: timeline, issues, keywords, actors, stakeholders, users and questions to ask.