The proposed project aims to enhance the capabilities of the ELIXIR infrastructure to track, credit, and recognise software contributions made by research software engineers. The project seeks to foster collaboration and engagement within the ELIXIR Communities and platforms by working with different stakeholders, including individual contributors to research software, to indicators that help measure the value of these contributions.
The primary objective of this project is to promote a strong sense of community by recognising individual software contributions. We plan to connect APICURON and GitHub to track open-source research software contributions and reward each contributor for their efforts. We will also link OpenEBench evaluation data to this process by crosslinking GitHub repositories available in the Software Observatory section with APICURON. This will involve retrieving activity data from GitHub and OpenEBench, processing it, and integrating it into the APICURON platform. Recognition items will be pushed to ORCID from APICURON and made available for third-party services.
We will leverage the involvement of APICURON and OpenEBench in the Data and Tools platforms and in the ELIXIR STEERS and EVERSE projects. These platforms and projects provide a network of stakeholders and guidance for implementing a fair recognition infrastructure.
The project's usefulness lies in its ability to address a significant gap in the recognition and valuation of research software contributions. By providing a framework for recognition, we can incentivise and motivate developers to contribute to open-source software projects, leading to improved software quality and reproducibility and positively impacting the environment by reducing the carbon footprint.
Adel Bouhraoua, Gavin Farell, Carles Hernandez-Ferrer