Nine Best Practices for Research Software Registries and Repositories: A Concise Guide

TL;DR

This paper presents nine best practices for creating and managing scientific software registries and repositories to enhance discoverability, transparency, and reproducibility in research.

Contribution

It provides a concise, experience-based guideline for developers of software registries and repositories, filling a gap in available best practices.

Findings

Nine best practices for software registries and repositories.

Guidelines derived from real-world experiences.

Aimed at improving research transparency and reproducibility.

Abstract

Scientific software registries and repositories serve various roles in their respective disciplines. These resources improve software discoverability and research transparency, provide information for software citations, and foster preservation of computational methods that might otherwise be lost over time, thereby supporting research reproducibility and replicability. However, developing these resources takes effort, and few guidelines are available to help prospective creators of registries and repositories. To address this need, we present a set of nine best practices that can help managers define the scope, practices, and rules that govern individual registries and repositories. These best practices were distilled from the experiences of the creators of existing resources, convened by a Task Force of the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group during the years 2019-2020. We believe that putting in place specific policies such as those presented here will help scientific software registries and repositories better serve their users and their disciplines.