We hope that everyone is able to stay safe in these difficult times.

This month, we celebrate the first ReSA blog post, share the outcomes of the RDA Software Source Code Interest Group meeting on FAIR 4 Software, and highlight special journal issues on software and data citation.

ReSA’s first blog post

We have posted our first blog, in support of our mission is to bring research software communities together to collaborate on the advancement of research software. The blog reports on the work of a ReSA taskforce that identified and analysed the research software landscape, and was posted by URSSI, SSI and Netherlands eScience Center. Readers are invited to continue to add or make corrections to the ReSA list of research software communities by making comments in the spreadsheet, which will continue to be curated by ReSA. Please email Daniel S. Katz if you are interested in writing a landscape paper based on further analysis and work.

FAIR 4 Research Software

Last week the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Plenary 15 online events included two RDA Source Code Interest Group meetings on FAIR 4 Software. The meeting agenda, notes and slides are available for review. More than 40 people joined to continues community-led discussions (at RDA, FORCE11 and ELIXIR) on how to effectively apply FAIR principles to research software. The goal of the session was to assess the interest across the community on the topic of adapting and defining FAIR principles for research software with the aim of defining the scope, outputs and leadership of a new working group to take forward development of the principles. A summary of the discussions will soon be circulated, including next steps regarding the formation of a FAIR 4 software taskforce supported by ReSA, RDA and FORCE11.

Journal special issues

Two special issues have been published by Computing in Science and Engineering (CiSE) on Software and Data Citation:

• Part 1: Computing in Science & Engineering (CiSE), v. 22(1), IEEE, January-February 2020: https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/cs/2020/01
• Part 2: Computing in Science & Engineering (CiSE), v. 22(2), IEEE, March-April 2020: https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/cs/2020/02
• Editorial: https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MCSE.2020.2969730.

This special issue is intended to inform the scientific computing community about recent advances and the current state of the art in software and data citation. Initial work has been done elsewhere to define standards and principles for software and data citation, and the basic required infrastructure is now in place. The challenge now is to adopt these practices. As their uptake increases, we believe that our professional culture will increasingly encourage production and sharing of software and data, leading to better and more reproducible and reusable results. The articles in this special issue discuss how software, data, and related digital objects are cited and otherwise mentioned in publications today, how to best cite them to make them accessible in the future, and what we can learn from the citations.