Overview
Codefair is a free and open source GitHub app that acts as your personal assistant when it comes to making your research software reusable and especially complying with the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) Principles for Research Software (FAIR4RS Principles).
What is a research software?
The commonly accepted definition of research software is "Any software created during the research process or for a research purpose". It can come in many format and could be developed for different applications such as artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) models with Python, data visualization tools with Jupyter notebook, or data analysis code with R.
What does making a research software FAIR means?
The FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) Principles for Research Software (FAIR4RS Principles) are a set of high-level instructions established by the research software community to make software reusable. Making research software FAIR means complying with each of the 17 FAIR principles.
What are the challenges?
We developed the FAIR-Biomedical Research Software (FAIR-BioRS) guidelines so it is easier for researchers to make their software compliant with the FAIR4RS Principles. However, it still requires time and effort to do so, especially when software is frequently updated and has multiple contributors
How does Codefair help?
Just install Codefair from the GitHub marketplace on your software's GitHub repository. By communicating with you through GitHub issues and submitting pull requests, Codefair will then make sure that your software follows best coding practices, provides metadata in standard format, includes a license file, and much more to align with the FAIR4RS principles.
Impact of Codefair
Snapshot of usage and adoption
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Repositories managed
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Individual users and organizations using Codefair
Development Approach
The Codefair application is maintained in a GitHub repository and is developed in an open and transparent manner. It ingeniously combines Probot, a serverless environment on Vercel, and the Octokit library. We are always open for contributions from the community.
Team
Members
Researchers, engineers, and collaborators behind this project.
Timeline
Milestone 3
Continued development
April 2024 - Present
Impact related to this project
Showing 7 publications
- 2025Conference Presentations
Patel, B., Portillo, D., & Soundarajan, S. (2025, October 5). Making Research Software Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) with Codefair. US Research Software Engineering Conference 2025 (USRSE'25), Philadelphia, PA. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17268745
- 2025Posters
Portillo D, Soundarajan S and Patel B. Codefair: easily make Biomedical Research Software Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) [version 1; not peer reviewed]. F1000Research 2025, 14:745 (poster) (https://doi.org/10.7490/f1000research.1120251.1)
- 2024Software
Codefair. (started 2024). https://github.com/fairdataihub/codefair-app (Development status: Active)
- 2024Conference Presentations
Portillo, D., Soundarajan, S., Clark, J., & Patel, B. (2024). Codefair: Your Personal Assistant for Developing FAIR Software (Presentation) (1.0.0). Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/records/13948381
- Codefair: Make biomedical research software FAIR without breaking a sweat
Slides presented at Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC), 2024
2024Conference PresentationsPortillo, D., Soundarajan, S., Clark, J., & Patel, B. (2024). Codefair: Make biomedical research software FAIR without breaking a sweat (13:912). F1000 Research. https://doi.org/10.7490/f1000research.1119824.1
- 2024Posters
Portillo, D, Soundarajan, S, Clark, J & Patel, B. (2024). Codefair - Your Personal Assistant for Developing FAIR Software (Poster) (1.0.0). Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/records/13948350
- Codefair - Make biomedical research software FAIR without breaking a sweat
Slides presented at Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) 2023 and Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) 2023
2024PostersPortillo, D, Soundarajan, S, Clark, J & Patel, B. (2024). Codefair - Make biomedical research software FAIR without breaking a sweat (13:911). F1000Research. https://doi.org/10.7490/f1000research.1119823.1