Open Consultation: Recommendations by the EOSC Task Force on Scholarly Infrastructures of Research Software. Deadline: Nov 10, 2020

flavoursofopenscience's bookmarks 2020-10-22

Summary:

The TF on Scholarly Infrastructures of Research Software, as part of the Architecture WG of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Executive Board, has established a set of recommendations to allow EOSC to include software, next to publications and data, in the realm of its research artifacts. This work is built upon a survey and documentation of a representative panel of current operational infrastructures across Europe, comparing their scopes and approaches.

This report summarizes the state of the art, identifies best practices, as well as open problems, and paves the way for federating the different approaches in view of supporting the software pillar of EOSC.  

As the fuel of innovation, the engine of our industries and a fundamental pillar of academic research, software is a necessary component of modern scholarly research. Hence, software developments emerge across many fields and disciplines. Unfortunately, often forgotten is the important fact that software is actually a special form of knowledge, designed by humans to be read by humans, executed by machines, in the form of software source code. Software source code allows the description of data visualization, data analysis, data transformation, and data processing in general with a level of precision that goes way beyond what can be achieved in scholarly articles. It is now well recognized that without access to the software used in research projects, it is extremely difficult to reproduce scientific results, and to build upon the results obtained by other researchers.

Over the past decade, awareness has been raised about the importance of software in the scholarly world. Several infrastructures have started to be built, or adapted, to address some of the four key challenges that need to be tackled to make software a first-class citizen in the scholarly world:

  1. Archiving software to ensure research software artifacts are not lost.

  2. Referencing software to ensure research artifacts can be precisely identified.

  3. Describing software to easily discover and identify research software artifacts.

  4. Crediting all authors to ensure their contributions are recognized.

To start addressing these challenges, the TF was formed by representatives of the EOSC Architecture WG together with representatives from current operational infrastructures across Europe (presented in Section 2.2.). The TF covers the full spectrum of archives, publishers, and aggregators (including catalogs) and is considered a representative panel based on their wide-ranging experience in addressing some of the challenges involved in building the four pillars.

The TF considers that addressing these needs will require establishing standards, developing tools, improving and interconnecting infrastructures, training, outreach, and involvement with the publishing community. Proper funding will need to be provided both for the development, communication, and outreach efforts, and for the operational costs.

The TF concretely delivered a set of recommendations that emerged from the analysis of the current needs and state of the art, and the design of the future architecture. They include short term actionable items, broader policy recommendations for the EOSC, as well as a longer term perspective.

Short term recommendations are foreseen to be turned into concrete development projects in a 2–4-year time-frame. The concrete recommendations detailed at the end of this report have the objective to (i) strengthen interactions between archives, publishers, and aggregators, (ii) adopt metadata standards, (iii) generalize the use of extrinsic and intrinsic identifiers for software, (iv) ensure appropriate citations for research software source code, (v) foster standardization through policy and guidelines, and (vi) easing adoption of the processes and tools for the research community at large.

The TF foresees that the EOSC has a key role to play in ensuring the overall architecture will be built in a way to best cater to the needs of the research community. To ensure openness, transparency, and good governance, the EOSC should elaborate a set of criteria of excellence, incorporating these principles, for its participating infrastructures, and concrete recommendations are provided. Additionally, the EOSC should actively get involved with the key infrastructures for software, take part in their strategic evolution and earmark proper funding to ensure their long term sustainability.

The longer term perspectives include objectives that should be taken up in the roadmap to be addressed over a 4–7-year horizon. Of importan

Link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yObRCR7COQctpjMdg-rNenRZ7ZeUZ-u0iyvdpPRK598/edit

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Tags:

oa.new oa.eosc oa.europe oa.infrastructure oa.consultations oa.software oa.data oa.recommendations

Date tagged:

10/22/2020, 04:26

Date published:

10/22/2020, 00:26