Reusing research software, the software that advances society by supporting and contributing to academic research, is hard. It is hard to find the algorithm needed, it is hard to extract only the source code that is needed, and it is hard to give credits to the original research software engineers that developed the software. In this project we want to make Research Software more FAIR, i.e., Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
The research software (ReSoft) ecosystem can benefit from our technology, as it enables, with a relatively small investment, research software engineers to rapidly find information about research software that can improve FAIRness. Using a series of Github actions, we try to collect data about a research software project and store this on a portal that monitors research impact. In this way we make research software more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR).
The intended beneficiaries of the project are Research Software Engineers (RSEs), who benefit from the FAIR Research Software Impact Portal (RSIP), which enables them to monitor the impact of their software and reward others for the software they reuse. Organizations that produce ReSoft can use the tools to report on the impact their software has made. Finally, empirical software engineering researchers, such as ourselves, can use the content in the SearchSECO Database to analyze the ReSoft ecosystem at a scale that was impossible before.
