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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