Open dr-eric-jensen opened 12 months ago
See Research Software Visibility Infrastructure Priorities Report by Karthik Ram and James Howison, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.8404846
Particularly recommendations 3 and 7, both in terms of their explanation of the problem, and recommendations:
Create a software use infrascope as an observatory based on software mentions in publications to highlight particular areas of strength or opportunity in Australia. Software lacks visibility in research, making it challenging to identify crucial software for specific research areas. We recommend that the ARDC play a role in developing a “software use infrascope” based on recognizing software in the full text of publications to systematically understand the software used by Australian researchers, categorized by research topics. This tool would enable stakeholders to identify software trends, support training programs, and assess the impact of software packages, enhancing research collaboration and funding opportunities.
Provide guidance for implementing web analytics to understand usage. Software projects require reliable data to showcase their impact and understand their user base. While traditional metrics like download counts have credibility issues, focus group participants emphasized the potential of website analytics to gauge impact. We recommend that the ARDC promote the use of web analytics on the documentation and websites of research software projects, offering guidance, training, and resources to maximize their benefits.
the clickable link to the report: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8404846
Potential Activity Scope Identify factors (manual, such as evaluations, and automated, such as crawling repos) that are part of impact and publicize them. Some known factors to investigate include quantifying code contributions, code review, mentoring. Determine good practices (for formatting or housing the information on these factors) so those factors are discoverable and/or queryable.
Potential Objectives
Targeted Impacts If successful, this effort could help deliver the following impact objectives:
This potential activity was curated as part of "Charting the Course: Policy and Planning for Sustainable Research Software," a Sloan Foundation-funded project within URSSI dedicated to supporting the future of research software through evidence-informed policy work (Project contacts are: @danielskatz and @dr-eric-jensen). If you are interested in working on this, please add a comment.