Introducing the Actionable Guidelines for FAIR Research Software Task Force

I'm thrilled to announce that I'm leading a new task force under the Research Software Alliance (ReSA) called the Actionable Guidelines for FAIR Research Software (Actionable FAIR4RS) Task Force!

The FAIR4RS Principles are great but not easy to implement...

Research software is a critical element of modern scientific research. Making it Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) is crucial for fostering reproducibility, promoting transparency, ensuring sustainability, and accelerating scientific progress. The FAIR4RS Principles established in 2022 provide an important framework for making research software FAIR. However, like the original FAIR Principles they were inspired by, they remain intentionally aspirational. We established the FAIR Biomedical Research Software (FAIR-BioRS) Guidelines to fill this gap but they have not received cross-discipline community input, which is necessary to generalize them to any software outside of biomedical research. Such domain-agnostic guidelines are needed to make any research software FAIR, as revealed by a survey of the research software community conducted in 2024 by the FAIR4RS Working Group.

... so we are establishing domain-agnostic guidelines to make software FAIR!

To address this gap, I initiated the Actionable FAIR4RS Task Force. After my proposal was accepted in September 2024 by ReSA, we had our kickoff meeting in December 2024. The Task Force is formed of a diverse international team of researchers and research software developers from various fields including biomedical research, data science, and knowledge representation. The goal of the Task Force is to provide actionable and domain-agnostic guidelines for implementing the FAIR4RS Principles to make research software FAIR. I am excited to see that what started as a side-project in December 2021 has now become a global effort. Please visit our webpage if you want to learn more or join this effort (we are having a blast!). By working together, we can transform software FAIRness from an aspiration to an achievable reality for all research communities.