FAIRSECO: An infrastructure for measuring impact of research software

Abstract

Finding research software is a complex task, as research software engineers regularly search for algorithms and methods deeply embedded in large software packages during the creation of research software. Furthermore, they go through lengthy evaluation and extraction processes to find one particular algorithm relevant to their research project. Additionally, for creators of research software, it is hard to show the impact that their code has made on the field, and only very course measures exist for evaluating the success of research software. This study introduces the concept of FAIRSECO, which aims to enable research software engineers to rapidly find and extract relevant software fragments from the worldwide research software ecosystem. Research software engineers from all fields can transplant these source code fragments, maintain the provenance of source code, and easily credit the original authors of the software. Simultaneously, the platform also enables research software engineers to report on their software's impact. With FAIRSECO, we introduce a platform for research software engineers that creates a “method economy”, i.e., where smaller granularity reuse becomes possible while increasing FAIRness (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) of the worldwide research software ecosystem.