Codefair

Make your research software
reusable without breaking a sweat!

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Codefair logo

About

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.

Development Approach

The Codefair application is maintained in a GitHub repository and is developed in an open and transparent manner. It ingenuily combines Probot, a serverless environment on Vercel, and the Octokit library. We are always open for contributions from the community.

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Timeline

December 2022 - Birth of codefair

The concept of codefair is mapped out by the FAIR Data Innovations Hub.

March 2024 - First version released

The first version of codefair is publicly released on the GitHub marketplace.

April 2024 - Present - Continued development

Features are added to codefair for helping researchers with all requirements of making software FAIR.

Impact

Codefair

Citation

Codefair. (2024). https://github.com/fairdataihub/codefair-app

Codefair: Make biomedical research software FAIR without breaking a sweat

Slides presented at Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC), 2024

Citation

Portillo D, Soundarajan S, Clark J and Patel B. Codefair: Make biomedical research software FAIR without breaking a sweat. F1000Research 2024, 13:912

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

Citation

Portillo D, Soundarajan S, Clark J and Patel B. Codefair - Make biomedical research software FAIR without breaking a sweat. F1000Research 2024, 13:911