M5.6 - Practical tests for automated FAIR software assessment in a disciplinary context

FAIR-IMPACT have developed 17 metrics that can be used to automate the assessment of research software against the FAIR Principles for Research Software (FAIR4RS Principles). These build on the outputs of the RDA/ReSA/FORCE11 FAIR for Research Software Working Group and existing guidelines and metrics for research software to define metrics for the assessment of the FAIR4RS Principles. FAIR software can be defined as research software which adheres to these principles, and the extent to which a principle has been satisfied can be measured against the criteria in a metric via a set of tests.

This work has been continued by fully implementing two of the metrics, FRSM-13 (dependencies, build and configuration) and FRSM-15 (licensing information), as well as providing skeletons for many of the other metrics. This was done by extending the F-UJI tool, which was originally developed for assessing datasets, to include tests for the research software metrics, and evaluating these discipline-agnostic tests against a collection of reference repositories provided by FAIR-EASE. Additionally, discipline-specific versions of the metrics were implemented based on the version of the metrics defined by CESSDA, and evaluated against a collection of reference repositories provided by CESSDA.