Jensen Eric A, Katz Daniel S
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA.
Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom.
Sci Data. 2025 Apr 15;12(1):627. doi: 10.1038/s41597-025-04820-4.
Research software has become indispensable in contemporary research and is now viewed as essential infrastructure in many scholarly fields. Encompassing source code, algorithms, scripts, computational workflows, and executables generated during or specifically for research, it plays a critical role in advancing scholarly knowledge. The research software field includes considerable open-source use and links to the broader open science movement. In this context, it has been argued that the well-established FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles for research data should be adapted for research software under the label FAIR4RS. However, the level of uptake of FAIR4RS principles is unclear. To gauge FAIR4RS’s status, international research funders involved in supporting research software (n = 36) were surveyed about their awareness of the concept. The survey reveals much greater familiarity with the more established FAIR principles for data (73% ‘extremely familiar’) than FAIR4RS (33% ‘extremely familiar’). Nevertheless, there is still considerable recognition of the relatively new FAIR4RS concept, a significant achievement for efforts to extend open science policies and practices to encompass research software.
研究软件在当代研究中已变得不可或缺，如今在许多学术领域被视为重要的基础设施。它涵盖了研究过程中生成的或专门为研究而生成的源代码、算法、脚本、计算工作流程和可执行文件，在推动学术知识发展方面发挥着关键作用。研究软件领域有大量开源应用，并与更广泛的开放科学运动相关联。在这种背景下，有人认为，针对研究数据已确立的FAIR（可查找、可访问、可互操作、可重用）原则应适用于研究软件，即FAIR4RS。然而，FAIR4RS原则的采用程度尚不清楚。为了评估FAIR4RS的现状，对参与支持研究软件的国际研究资助者（n = 36）进行了调查，询问他们对这一概念的认知情况。调查显示，与FAIR4RS（33%“非常熟悉”）相比，他们对已确立的数据FAIR原则更为熟悉（73%“非常熟悉”）。尽管如此，相对较新的FAIR4RS概念仍得到了相当程度的认可，这是将开放科学政策和实践扩展到研究软件的努力所取得的一项重大成就。
