Software citation principles

Software is a critical part of modern research and yet there is little support across the scholarly ecosystem for its acknowledgement and citation. Inspired by the activities of the FORCE11 working group focused on data citation, this document summarizes the recommendations of the FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group and its activities between June 2015 and April 2016. Based on a review of existing community practices, the goal of the working group was to produce a consolidated set of citation principles that may encourage broad adoption of a consistent policy for software citation across disciplines and venues. Our work is presented here as a set of software citation principles, a discussion of the motivations for developing the principles, reviews of existing community practice, and a discussion of the requirements these principles would place upon different stakeholders. Working examples and possible technical solutions for how these principles can be implemented will be discussed in a separate paper

Making research software FAIR and citable

There is growing acknowledgment that software constitutes a valid research output. As such, it must be made available under the FAIR Principles for Research Software (FAIR4RS). Software publication with rich metadata allows researchers to provide their software in such a way, thus enabling better reproducibility of research results obtained using software, more credit for research software creators through citation, and improved sustainability. Currently, FAIR software publication is not common practice due to a lack of incentives, of clearly defined processes, and of publication support through tools and infrastructures. This talk presents the context of, and practical approaches to, automated FAIR4RS software publication: improving citation metadata for research software with the Citation File Format, and automating software publication with rich metadata using the HERMES workflow for continuous integration systems

Impactmessung, Transparenz & Open Science

Objective — The article discusses if it is sufficient to scale down Open Science to a free availability of objects, for example scientific publications (open access), or whether impact metrics that steer science and scientists must also be re-modeled under open science principles. Methods — Well-known, citation-based impact metrics and new, alternative metrics are reviewed using the following criteria to assess whether they are open metrics: Scientific verifiability and modeling, transparency in their construction and methodology, consistency with the principles of open knowledge. Results — Neither citation-based impact metrics nor alternative metrics can be labeled open metrics. They all lack scientific foundation, transparency and verifiability. Conclusions — Since neither citation-based impact metrics nor alternative metrics can be considered open, it seems necessary to draw up a list of criteria for open metrics. This catalog includes aspects such as justifications and documentation for the selection of data sources, open availability of the data underlying the calculation of the impact scores, options to retrieve the data automatically via software interfaces, logical, scientific and documented justifications about the formula or parameters used to calculate impact values

Software publications with rich metadata: state of the art, automated workflows and HERMES concept

To satisfy the principles of FAIR software, software sustainability and software citation, research software must be formally published. Publication repositories make this possible and provide published software versions with unique and persistent identifiers. However, software publication is still a tedious, mostly manual process. To streamline software publication, HERMES, a project funded by the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration, develops automated workflows to publish research software with rich metadata. The tooling developed by the project utilizes continuous integration solutions to retrieve, collate, and process existing metadata in source repositories, and publish them on publication repositories, including checks against existing metadata requirements. To accompany the tooling and enable researchers to easily reuse it, the project also provides comprehensive documentation and templates for widely used CI solutions. In this paper, we outline the concept for these workflows, and describe how our solution advance the state of the art in research software publication

Creating visual aids with graphic organisers on an infinite canvas : the impact on the presenter

Instead of the traditional set of slides, the visual aids of a presentation can now be graphic organisers (concept maps, knowledge maps, mind maps) on an infinite canvas. Constructing graphic organisers has a beneficial impact on learning, but this topic has not been studied in the context of giving a presentation. The present study examined this issue by having 199 students prepare a presentation. The control sample created visual aids that are similar to a deck of slides with text and pictures. In the first experimental condition, graphic organisers were inserted in this deck of slides, and in the second experimental condition, visuals aids with interconnected graphic organisers were produced. There were no significant differences in self-reported self-efficacy related to giving a presentation and in motivational variables. To detect if the presentations met the principles set by the conditions, the participants’ products were coded qualitatively, but this analysis also yielded no differences in variables. Further research should therefore explore the interaction between software and presenter