Abstract
Software plays a crucial and growing role in research. Unfortunately, the computational component in Life Sciences research is challenging to reproduce and verify most of the time. It could be undocumented, opaque, may even contain unknown errors that affect the outcome, or be directly unavailable, and impossible to use by others. These issues are detrimental to the overall quality of scientific research. One step to address this problem is the formulation of principles that research software in the domain should meet to ensure its quality and sustainability, resembling the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) Data Principles. Within the ELIXIR infrastructure, OpenEBench aims to be an open platform providing both support for scientific benchmarking and an active observatory of software quality for the universe of Life Sciences research software. We present our initial proposal to instantiate a FAIR-like framework for assessing software quality as the first step toward the implementation of such an observatory in OpenEBench.
Supplementary Material: FAIRsoft - Supplementary materials FAIRsoft.SupplementaryTables FAIRsoft.SupplementaryTables-Landscape
Other Figures: figures draft
Repository: https://gitlab.bsc.es/inb/elixir/software-observatory/FAIRsoft_ETL
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
Figure 3 updated: license files have been included in the analysis and software versions have been classified as "Semantic Versioning" using the same strict criteria used to calculate the related FAIRsoft indicator. These changes make the results shown in Figures 2 and 3 fully consistent. Figure 2 updated: percentage labels in Figure 2 have been updated.
https://gitlab.bsc.es/inb/elixir/software-observatory/FAIRsoft_ETL
