Keywords

FAIR software
CDH Research Software Lab

Short description

Over the ten years of its existence, the CDH Research Software Lab has collaborated with a great number of humanities scholars, which has led to an extensive and diverse portfolio of research software for text mining, language processing, databases and visualization. Even though much of this software is publicly available, a substantial part does not yet adhere to all standards for FAIR software (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) due to budget limitations.

The aim of this FAIRer DH Software project is to meet these important quality standards, thereby increasing the visibility and reusability of our research software. Specifically, we aim to achieve this result by going through the following steps:

Making all of our ca. 75 remaining private software repositories publicly available by converting their status to public (in exceptional cases, duly respecting restrictions set by our research partners);
Making our full software portfolio citable by adding CITATION.cff files to the repositories, and using an archiving service to generate persistent identifiers for each release;
Adding permissive licenses specifying under which conditions software can be reused and modified, such as Apache-2.0If or BSD-3-Clause;
If the repository is a library which can be reused in other software development projects through PyPI or npm, the software will be released through these channels;
Evaluating and improving the adherence to other software quality standards such as the EURISE markdown checklist; this step will concern documentation, development practices, interoperability and administration.

The intake checklist that RSLab uses when starting up new development projects will be updated, as well as our tool for building web applications, meaning that questions of openness, licensing, documentation and administration will be discussed early in the development trajectory. Furthermore, all future RSLab software projects will meet the FAIR standards.

Throughout this project, the RSLab team collaborates with Utrecht University’s FAIR Data and Software working group, who have expertise and computational tools available to evaluate a software repository’s adherence to the FAIR principles.

By meeting the standards for FAIR software:

Our software repositories can be found more easily by researchers from various scientific disciplines;
Research applications can be reused more easily – in its entirety, or generic components of code functioning as building blocks in other software development projects;
Researchers will be able to specifically cite the application used, including which version, thereby enhancing the transparency and reproducibility of research.

Background

The Research Software Lab (RSLab), part of the Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH), consists of a specialised team of scientific developers who offer IT support by building tools for targeted research and education. Although the RSLab mainly operates within the humanities domain, a substantial part of our software is generic enough to also be useful for researchers from various other scientific disciplines. One can think of reusing applications in its entirety, but also of software components functioning as basic building blocks of code in other development projects.

The practice of making our research software repositories public, citable, more easily findable and reusable aligns with the overall mission of the RSLab to help researchers achieve greater digital literacy. By making our own digital methods more available, we encourage researchers to make use of them.