FAIRshare

Researching guidelines exist to nudge researchers in the right direction with their work. Whether they concern the work itself, or its publication, their purpose is to standardize the process from beginning to end. While this is pretty much the order-of-the-day in academia, the guidelines — or lack thereof — for research software differ a bit.

In an effort to make computer research data more accessible, FAIRshare is an initiative that plans to bridge the gap when it comes to curating and sharing biomedical research data and software, all based on a set of guidelines to ensure that everyone is on equal footing.

The app is big on curation and sharing, and in that regard, it puts a set of guidelines in place to encourage fair use and distribution of, for now, research software: such as scripts, models, code libraries, and so on. Users can head over to the Curate & Share interface and create a new project: provide a name and description, and the tool will guide your way.

Based on the FAIR Biomedical research guidelines, the app helps users review their work every step of the way. Choose the directory where your work is located, and go through the software development practices to see how everything fares.

The app asks you about following certain guidelines, providing information along the way on whichever step you need help with. Questions entail following the standards and best practices for your code, having your documentation adhere to the same standards, as well as ensuring that your work does not violate HIPAA — the latter is especially applicable to biomedical research projects.

Moving on, you'll be asked to provide some metadata for your project. Name, description, creation date, authors and contributors, category, keywords, funding, the like. Information about the programming language, runtime platform, operating system, as well as software requirements also require to be filled in. You may also provide the code repository of your work.

Current version, release notes, and other similar information can also be provided, but it is not necessary. A license will also have to be selected. Users have to select a fair repository to share their research software: Zenodo, Figshare, and Software Heritage are some available options, among others.

FAIRshare takes an ambitious initiative and turns it into a full-blown app: users should appreciate how committed the program is to helping users make their software findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable — just as its name implies.