The SciCodes Consortium (https://scicodes.net/) recognizes the need for editors and maintainers of research software registries and repositories to share knowledge of best practices and create standards. Our 37 members represent science organizations, institutions, and multidisciplinary research communities that span the institutions across disciplines including biological, medical, mathematical and physical sciences and engineering. These repositories play a pivotal role in strengthening research by enhancing the discoverability of software, thereby supporting transparency, reproducibility, and fostering efficiency through software reuse. Hence, through their stewardship of software, our members pursue common goals including the recognition of software as a first-class citizen in research and establishing metadata standards to enable searching across multiple software registries.
SciCodes grew from the Best Practices for Registries Task Force as part of the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group. These best practices (Garijo et al., 2022) are:
- Provide a public scope statement
- Provide guidance for users
- Provide guidance to software contributors
- Establish an authorship policy
- Share your metadata schema
- Stipulate conditions of use
- State a privacy policy
- Provide a retention policy
- Disclose your end-of-life policy
The group regularly self assesses for compliance. Examples of how these best practices are implemented in practice are linked to from our website.
We invite the community to join our monthly discussions to:
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- Discuss challenges and share solutions to common issues that arise in managing our resources
- Strengthen resources through implementation of identified best practices
- Keep up with and share advances through monthly presentations
- Speed adoption of CodeMeta and CFF standards to improve software citation and discoverability
References
Garijo, D. et al., 2022. Nine best practices for research software registries and repositories. PeerJ Computer Science 8:e1023 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.1023
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![Poster title: How Important is Software to Astronomy? Poster text: Software is the most used instrument in astronomy All astronomers use software Robust research requires reproducibility and transparency Computational methods are methods, and should be easily discoverable and open to examination Releasing source code demonstrates confidence in your results and improves efficiency in the discipline Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL, ascl.net) • Is a free curated online registry and repository for astro research source codes • Has over 3400 entries • Is indexed by ADS and Web of Science • Includes all major codes that have enabled astro research • Makes it easy to find this software • Advocates for open source and FAIR practices • Is citable and citations to its entries are tracked by major indexers • Adds new and old codes monthly ASCL entries have been cited more than 16,000 times in over 240 journals How to use the ASCL Register your code with the ASCL to make it easier for others to find and to get an ASCL ID to use for citing the software Search for useful downloadable software Find preferred citation information for software you’ve used in research Introduce students to variety of methods available for solving common astronomical problems e community Provides a curated resource for software methods Links research articles with the software that enables that research; links are passed to ADS, so also appear in that resource Allows for citation to software on its own merits without the need to write a separate article for it References [1] Momcheva, I. & Tollerud, E., 2015. Software Use in Astronomy: an Informal Survey, doi:10.48550/arXiv.1507.03989 [2] ASCL dashboard, https://ascl.net/dashboard, retrieved 16 July 2024](https://ascl.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/IAU2024ASCL_A1poster.jpg)