RDA/FORCE11 Software Source Code Identification WG

 
This WG has now completed. If you have any questions about the group topic or the WG Output, please direct them to the Software Source Code Interest Group, which is ongoing.
 

Software, and in particular source code, plays an important role in science: it is used in all research fields to produce, transform and analyse research data, and is sometimes itself an object of research and/or an output of research.

Unlike research data and scientific articles, though, software source code has only very recently been recognised as important subject matter in a few initiatives related to scholarly publication and archiving. These initiatives are now working on a variety of plans for handling the identification of software artifacts.

At the same time, unlike research data and scientific articles, the overwhelming majority of software source code is developed and used outside the academic world, in industry and in developer communities where software is routinely referenced, in practice, through methods that are totally different from the ones used in scholarly publications. 
The objective of this working group is to bring together a broad panel of stakeholders directly involved in software identification.

The planned output will be concrete recommendations for the academic community to ensure that the solutions that will be adopted by the academic players are compatible with each other and especially with the software development practice of tens of millions of developers worldwide.