What Are Digital Research Assets?
A significant amount of software is used to generate or support academic output, e.g., peer-reviewed journal papers. Some of the published papers contains a reference to the used software. However, even when a reference is included, it is not trivial to reproduce all or some of the statements/results in the paper. This is can have various reasons:
- The software is not sufficiently or clearly documented;
- The software cannot be installed and run in a local environment (e.g. laptop)
- The software is outdated;
- The input data is not complete or unclear;
- There is no reference output data available to validate your local environment setup.
Investing in sustainable research software is not only investing in reproducability and verification of research output, but also in academic research continuity. The developed research software can be made part of the research project output as a separate product. Appropriately designed research software will eliminate the overhead of “re-inventing the wheel” for subsequent research project(s), which is still common practice nowadays.
Making Your Assets Openly Accessible to Everyone
Research software as a product can be made generally available, i.e., outside an academic research team. This can be done via open sourcing, or it can be converted into a commercial application. Open sourcing allows for distributing knowledge and tools to other research groups across the world.
In general, software can be seen as an information system in which data is exchanged. Data management plays an important role in software development. Data management captures solutions for data storage, data formats, but also data copyright constraints
and data security regarding GDPR.
There exists several repositories available for making your assets open access:
- GitHub
- Zenodo
- Figshare
- arXiv