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. As examples:
The relationship of researchers to research software can quite often be characterized as transitory or 'on/off', and is compounded by accelerated development life cycles: a researcher might only briefly use a tool, research software R&D funding is quite often time-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. 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 initial use cases are:
Our themes are run over a flexible time period, but as default for four 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, and by maintaining a 'notebook' to engaging in discourse and carry resource documentation.
Advanced software maintenance systems make use of systems for version control 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 the software where applicable. With the recent addition of technologies such as continuous integration software can be validated to be in good working order and so ensure it is fit to be used.
Building on these three technologies, in the not too distant future, the working environment for software R&D will be able to being about a much greater sustainability. Example are a project like Binder for republish Jupyter notebooks https://mybinder.org
See the brief sketch on such future casting #Open SciFi story - what if?
A collaborative bibliography on software citation https://www.zotero.org/groups/1838445/o-s/items/tag/software-cite
Related journals
Key resources (provisional)
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.