Software Discovery Index Workshop Report
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Abstract
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), through the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative, held a workshop in May of 2014 to explore challenges facing the biomedical research community in locating, citing, and reusing biomedical software. The workshop participants examined these issues and prepared this report summarizing their findings.
The constituents with the potential to benefit from improved software discoverability include software users, developers, journal publishers, and funders. Software developers face challenges disseminating their software and measuring its adoption. Software users have difficulty identifying the most appropriate software for their work. Journal publishers lack a consistent way to handle software citations or to ensure reproducibility of published findings. Funding agencies struggle to make informed funding decisions about which software projects to support, while reviewers have a hard time understanding the relevancy and effectiveness of proposed software in the context of data management plans and proposed analysis.
This document summarizes recommendations generated from an NIH Software Discovery Meeting held in May 2014. We are now requesting comments from the larger community. We have contacted a broad set of constituents who represent software users, software developers, NIH staff, electronic repositories, and journal publishers.
References
http://softwarediscoveryindex.org/
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Vivien Bonazzi; Phil Bourne; Steven Brenner; Robin Brown; Ishwar Chandramouliswaran; Jennifer Couch; Sean Davis; Leslie Derr; Asif Dhar; Luke Dunlap; Kevin Eliceiri; Leigh Finnegan; Ian Fore; Melissa Haendel; Martin Hammitzsch; Tram Huyen; Daniel S. Katz; Mike Kellen; David Kennedy; Jennie Larkin; Jennifer Lin; Peter Lyster; Ron Margolis; Gabor Marth; Maryann Martone; Michael McLennan; Martin Morgan; Francis Ouellette; Vinay Pai; Andreas Prlic; Will Schroeder; Michael Sherman; Heidi Sofia; James Taylor; Kaitlin Thaney; Chris Wellington; Owen White (2015), "Software Discovery Index Workshop Report," https://ncihub.cancer.gov/resources/885.