Nine best practices for research software registries and repositories

• Published in: PeerJ. Computer science Vol. 8; p. e1023
• Main Authors: Garijo, Daniel, Ménager, Hervé, Hwang, Lorraine, Trisovic, Ana, Hucka, Michael, Morrell, Thomas, Allen, Alice
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States PeerJ, Inc 08-08-2022; PeerJ; PeerJ Inc
• Subjects: Archives & records; Best practice; Best practices; Collaborative work; Computer Education; Computer Science; Digital Libraries; Interoperability; Meetings; Metadata; Policies; Repositories; Repository policies; Reproducibility; Research software registry; Research software registry guidelines; Research software repository; Science; Software; Software metadata; Task forces; Working groups; Research software registry guidelines; Research software repository; Repository policies; Software metadata; Best practices; Research software registry
• ISSN: 2376-5992; 2376-5992
• DOI: 10.7717/peerj-cs.1023

Scientific software registries and repositories improve software findability and research transparency, provide information for software citations, and foster preservation of computational methods in a wide range of disciplines. Registries and repositories play a critical role by supporting research reproducibility and replicability, but developing them takes effort and few guidelines are available to help prospective creators of these resources. To address this need, the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group convened a Task Force to distill the experiences of the managers of existing resources in setting expectations for all stakeholders. In this article, we describe the resultant best practices which include defining the scope, policies, and rules that govern individual registries and repositories, along with the background, examples, and collaborative work that went into their development. We believe that establishing specific policies such as those presented here will help other scientific software registries and repositories better serve their users and their disciplines.