FAIR Research Software and Science Gateways

In recent years, the scholarly community has examined its culture and practices, and found a set of overlapping areas in which to improve, including open science (making both the outputs and processes of scholarly research available), reproducibility (increasing trust in scholarly results by making them repeatable by others), and FAIR (making scholarly outputs, specifically data, findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable). While the scholarly community is generally supportive of all of these efforts, the degree of support wanes with both the amount of extra work that is needed and the lack of clear details on how to achieve them, along with misaligned incentives.

In this lightning talk, we will initially focus on FAIR and the details of how it can be applied to research software. This leads to a number of distinct challenges, including scope (defining both software and research software), principles (defining what findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable mean for research software), implementation (developing guidelines and instructions for how to make research software FAIR), and metrics (providing a means to measure the FAIRness of research software).

Science gateways include a number of different types of software, for example, the frameworks used to construct the gateways themselves, tools provided by the community that run in the gateway, and software implemented as services with which the gateways interact. The second part of this lightning talk will discuss how FAIR principles for research software apply to each of these types of software common in science gateways. We will close by explaining how members of the science gateway community can become more involved in the FAIR for research software process, to learn, to contribute, or to champion.