Research Software Visibility Infrastructure Priorities Report

Read this ARDC-commissioned report on infrastructure opportunities to advance the visibility of research software.

Research software has become critically important for modern research. Not only do researchers increasingly rely on software for their work, but many are involved in the creation, development, and maintenance of such tools as part of their research activity and output. The visibility of research software is crucial to research effectiveness.

Commissioned by the ARDC, this report provides insights into infrastructure opportunities to advance the visibility of research software. It is based on consultations with 6 focus groups of researchers, including participants across the ARDC’s People Research Data Commons (RDC) for health and medical research, Planet RDC for earth and environmental science research, and HASS and Indigenous RDC. The report makes 8 recommendations:

1. Work with research domain leaders to build norms around which software to cite.
2. Support the effort to create and disseminate software bills of materials (SBOMs).
3. Create a ‘software use infrascope’ as an observatory based on software mentions in publications to highlight particular areas of strength or opportunity in Australia.
4. Promote the creation and dissemination of fully worked example use cases aimed at different skill levels.
5. Support existing technology approaches to software archiving.
6. Support specialised communities of practice (online and offline).
7. Provide guidance for implementing web analytics to understand usage.
8. Provide a low-friction way for researchers to link to software alongside data submissions.

This report emerges from the See Research Software project under the ARDC’s research software program.

Contents

• Executive Summary
• Context
• Summary of Focus Groups
  • Software discovery
  • Use
  • Credit
  • Long-term archiving
  • Additional topics
• Recommendations
• Acknowledgements
• Appendix A: Author Bios
• References
• Endnotes