Guidelines

To help you identify key resources this page highlights those relevant to each of the ReSA themes: people, policy and infrastructure. These resources are mostly international recommendations, reports and guidelines that emphasise best practice.

See also the ADORE.software Toolkit. The toolkit provides examples of funder programs, policies, and resources for each of the Amsterdam Declaration on Funding Research Software Sustainability’s recommendations in the four areas of research software practice, research software ecosystem, research software personnel, and research software ethics.

People

• Foundational Competencies and Responsibilities of a Research Software Engineer by Florian Goth et al. (2023) explores educational paths for RSEs. The authors define what an RSE is, explore different types of work RSEs undertake, and define the fundamental competencies as well as values that represent the general profile of an RSE.

• Research Software Engineering (RSE) International Survey: 2022 results now available to help understand the RSE community, inform policies and create incentives that advance RSE interests, building on the 2018 and 2016 survey results.

• Why science needs more research software engineers, 2022.

• Visibility of Research Software Engineers in research funding, 2022. The Software Sustainability Institute poses the question: is there enough awareness of this role when granting applications are developed and costed?

• The Four Pillars of Research Software Engineering, 2021. Cohen et al. present four elements they believe are key to providing a comprehensive and sustainable support for research software engineering: software development, community, training, and policy.

• Understanding Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Challenges Within the Research Software Community, 2021. Analysis of 2018 international RSE survey provides evidence for a lack of diversity in the Research Software Engineers community. This paper identifies interventions which could address challenges and highlights areas where the community is becoming more diverse.

• ReSA software landscape analysis, 2020. identifies 50+ stakeholders in the research software community and topics of interest, e.g., preservation, RSEs, citation, productivity, sustainability.

• What do we know about RSEs? 2018. The Software Sustainability Institute analyses results from international surveys in 2016, 2017 and 2018 to learn more about RSEs and their work conditions.

• UK Research Software Survey, 2014. Analysis highlights the importance of software in conducting research, e.g., that 92% of academics use research software. The dataset is also available.

• The Research Software Engineer, 2012. Baxter et al. provide a synthesis of discussions that took place during and after the 2012 Collaborations Workshop organized by the Software Sustainability Institute in Oxford, UK.

• Database of Diverse Databases. Useful for finding speakers for a more equitable world - see listings for “Coding + Tech”, “Tech Policy” and “Science”.

Policy

• Ten simple rules for funding scientific open source software by Strasser et al. provides guidance and considerations for funders and other community members interested in supporting scientific software; addressing specific issues related to software, including contributor community development, governance, sustainability, and diversity and inclusion, based on experiences from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program officers.

• The Open Research Funders Group Policy Clause Bank and Policy Generator for open science policies includes a section on software code sharing.

• Evidence for the importance of research software, 2020. This ReSA analysis considers papers relating to meta-research, policy, community, education and training, research breakthroughs and specific software.

• ReSA Response to US RFI: Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications, Data and Code Resulting From Federally Funded Research, 2020. Focuses on how improving the recognition and value of research software can increase the access to unclassified published research, digital scientific data, and code supported by the US Government.

• Research software is essential for research data, so how should governments respond?, 2021. This ReSA blog post provides an overview of the current state of international adoption of research software policies and how different countries address these, in order to lay out concrete advice and examples for national governments wishing to update their policies.

• Six Recommendations for implementation of FAIR practice by the FAIR in practice task force of the European Open Science Cloud FAIR working group, 2020. This report analyses the state of FAIR practices within diverse research communities and FAIR-related policies in different countries and offers six practical recommendations on how FAIR can be turned into practice. It includes a separate section details FAIR practice for digital objects other than research data.

International policies

• OECD Council: In 2021 the OECD Council adopted a revised Council Recommendation on Access to Research Data from Public Funding. This legal instrument was revised for the first time to include software, meaning that OECD members (which include most research-intensive countries) will have to create policy and law to implement it. This recommendation, which is known as a “soft law” legal instrument, has been updated to address new technologies and policy developments. It provides policy guidance in seven areas with an expanded scope to cover not only research data, but also related metadata as well as bespoke algorithms, workflows, models, and software (including code), which are essential for their interpretation. The OECD Council recommends fostering (and requiring where appropriate) the adoption of good practice for research data and software management across the research system, promoting data and software citation in academic practice (including the development of citation standards), training a cadre of research software engineers and enabling recognition and reward of software development skills as high value added to publicly funded research and innovation.

• UNESCO: The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science was unanimously adopted by member states in 2021. This recommendation defines open scientific knowledge as “open access to scientific publications, research data, metadata, open educational resources, software, and source code and hardware that are available in the public domain or under copyright and licensed under an open licence”. In particular, the recommendation argues for users to gain free access to open source software and source code in a timely and user-friendly manner, in human- and machine-readable and modifiable format, under an open licence. The source code must be included in the software release and made available on openly accessible repositories, and the chosen licence must allow modifications, derivative works and sharing under equal or compatible open terms and conditions. See also the Checklist for Universities on Implementing the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science and other elements of the UNESCO Open Science Toolkit.

National and regional policies and strategies

• Australia: Australian National Agenda for Research Software, 2021. Addresses recognition of research software as a first class output of research in Australia.

• Canada: The Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy includes code deposit as a requirement, in addition to data and other outputs; and that grantees have a publicly accessible strategy to support policy around research data/software management per the Policy.

• Finland: Policies of open science and research are being drafted for four areas: culture for open scholarship, open access to scholarly publications, open access of research data and methods, and open education and open access to educational resources.

• European Union: Scholarly infrastructures for research software (SIRS): Report from the EOSC Executive Board Working Group (WG) Architecture Task Force, 2020. Establishes a set of recommendations to allow the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) to include software, next to other research outputs like 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 summarises 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.

• France: French National Plan for Open Science, 2021. Places software on a par with publications and data in research and Open Science. See also the activities of the Software College of the French National Committee on Open Science and Opportunity Note: Encouraging a wider usage of software derived from research.

• Italy: The Italian National Plan for Open Science proposes an overall vision, with specific strategies for five axes of intervention, which must interact to create an open ecosystem of publications, data, analysis tools, networked ICT infrastructures and services, evaluation and training.

• Netherlands: The 2021 National Roadmap for Large-Scale Research Facilities published by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) has made FAIR, sustainable software and a software management plan conditional to receiving funding. Software is central to the funding the NWO has made available for developing ‘digital competence centres’ as part of the national roadmap, and the NWO has set up an open science team to push this agenda.

• New Zealand: The New Zealand eScience Initiative (NeSI) are sharing how they enable research communities to truly value the contributions of research software in underpinning contemporary science in Contributing to local & global kōrero around the value, impacts and future of Research Software.

• United Kingdom: The Government Office for Science’s report on Large-scale computing: the case for greater UK coordination recognises that “high-quality software is fundamental to realising the benefits of investments in computing” and recommends “software development must keep pace with advances in hardware”. Recent reviews commissioned by individual research funders have echoed this including, BBSRC’s Review of Data Intensive Bioscience.

• USA: Major programs include the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) program and the Department of Energy’s (DoE) support for the Interoperable Design of Extreme-scale Application Software (IDEAS) projects, as well as other significant software investments in its Exascale Computing Project.

Research institution policies

ReSA is creating a listing of institutional policies that support research software in a range of organisations - please add to this or join the task force undertaking this work.

Infrastructure

Software development

• Making Biomedical Research Software FAIR: Actionable Step-by-step Guidelines with a User-support Tool, 2023.

• FAIR Principles for Research Software, 2022, introduced in this article in Scientific Data.

• Practical Guide to Software Management Plans by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and the Netherlands eScience Center, 2022.

• Nine Best Practices for Research Software Registries and Repositories: A Concise Guide, 2020. These resources improve software discoverability and research transparency, thereby supporting research reproducibility and replicability.

• What does Research Software look like?, by Rob van Nieuwpoort, 2022.

• “Research Software Sharing for Data Analysis” chapter of RDA COVID-19 Guidelines and Recommendations, 2020. Provides foundational, clear and practical recommendations around research software principles and practices, in order to facilitate open collaborations.

• Software development guide by Netherlands eScience Center.

• DLR Software Engineering Guidelines, 2018.

• 4 Open Source Software Recommendations, 2018.

• Top 10 FAIR Data & Software Things: Research Software, 2018.

• Good enough practices in scientific computing, 2017.

• Data and Software Management Plans must be public and should be machine-readable, by Daniel S. Katz, 2016.

Software sharing and citation

• CHORUS Software Citation Policies Index provides assistance to authors and publishers.

• New data reveals the hidden impact of open source in science, 2022.

• UK National Institutes of Health Best Practices for Sharing Research Software, 2021.

• Recognizing the value of software: A software citation guide, 2021.

• Software Citation Checklist for Authors, 2019.

• Software Citation Checklist for Developers, 2019.

• Software citation principles, 2016.

Lists of resources

• Software Heritage General Index of Software Engineering Papers enables the review of outputs of software engineering, 2022.

• SSI guides for everything. Guides for researchers, managers, developers, instructors and content distributors.

• SSI list of resources about various topics. Includes policy, journals, open access, reproducibility, RSEs, training, etc.

• Better Scientific Software (BSSw). Resources for developer productivity and software sustainability.

• Research Software Engineers International. Includes a list of national/multinational RSE associations.

Do you have resources to add?

• Submit a new resource as an issue via GitHub (requires a GitHub account)
• Email it directly to ReSA.