Learn about the FAIR Principles for Research Software, why they are important, and what resources are available to help make your research software findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.
By the end of reading this resource, you should:
Introduced in 2022, the FAIR Principles for Research Software (FAIR4RS) aim to make research software findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable – or FAIR.
FAIR4RS is based on the FAIR Guiding Principles for research data, which were published in 2016 to improve transparency, reproducibility, and reusability of scholarly data. Since then, the research community recognised the need to make other digital research objects, including research software, FAIR.
Emerging from the FAIR for Research Software Working Group (FAIR4RS WG) and based on community consultations that started in 2019, FAIR4RS presents a framework for making research software FAIR while addressing traits unique to software – such as executability, modularity, and continuous evolution and versioning – and the ecosystem in which it is developed and shared.
Read the FAIR4RS Principles.
In the evolving landscape of research, the demand for transparency, reproducibility, and accessibility has never been higher, the FAIR4RS principles are critical for advancing these goals.
This approach enables researchers to extend and enrich one another’s work, a necessity that Neil Chue Hong highlights: “You have to be able to build on the work of others and you can’t do that if things are not FAIR, doubly so for software. If I can build on something someone else has done, to get to the knowledge at the end of it, that gets me there faster.”
Recognising this, the OECD’s 2021 amendment on Recommendations of the Council concerning Access to Research Data from Public Funding calls for “taking steps to make research data and other research-relevant digital objects from public funding understandable and re-usable in the long term, including through the provision of high quality human-readable, machine-actionable, and open metadata and adequately maintained and supported bespoke algorithms, code, software, and workflows essential for re-use of data as free and open source”.
The publication of the FAIR4RS principles has created awareness and raised interest in the research community, leading to cultural change in areas including:
The ARDC played an active role in developing the FAIR4RS which underscores Australia’s leadership in promoting good practice for digital research infrastructure. The FAIR4RS principles are a significant step toward integrating software as a first-class research output, alongside data and publications, within the global research ecosystem.
Our involvement included:
The ARDC continues to provide national support for adopting the FAIR4RS principles through collaboration and guidance materials. (For resources supporting FAIR data, visit our Making Data FAIR page.)
Research infrastructures are needed for certain functionalities to apply FAIR to digital objects, including research software. The ARDC provides various services that support FAIR, including persistent identifiers (PIDs), data discovery, vocabulary development, and expert advice. The ARDC also provides national leadership in digital research infrastructure (DRI) skills in FAIR.
