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Presenting the Actionable Guidelines for FAIR Research Software Task Force Bhavesh Patel, Ph.D.1, Daniel Garijo, Ph.D.2, on behalf of the Actionable FAIR4RS Task Force 1FAIR Data Innovations Hub, California Medical Innovations Institute, San Diego, CA, USA 2Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain Background ●Research software is a critical element of modern scientific research. ●Making it FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) is crucial to support reproducibility, transparency, sustainability, and scientific progress. ●The FAIR4RS principles (2022) provide a framework to achieve this through unique identifiers, metadata, license, and more. They are now being adopted by researchers, organizations, and funders worldwide. Solution ●To address that, we established the Actionable Guidelines for the FAIR Research Software (Actionable FAIR4RS) Task Force in December 2024 under the Research Software Alliance (ReSA). ●The Task Force is run by a diverse international team of researchers and research software developers from various fields (Fig. 1). ●Goal: Create actionable and domain-agnostic guidelines for implementing the FAIR4RS principles, through a comprehensive, community-driven methodology. Problem ●By design, the FAIR4RS principles do not provide concrete implementation steps, making them difficult for developers to apply. ●Field-specific guidelines, such as FAIR-BioRS (2023), exist but lack broad, cross-disciplinary input. ●The 2 year community survey of the FAIR4RS principles confirmed the need for generalized actionable guidelines. Figure 3. Progress of the subgroup working on C5 - Metadata for software reuse. Figure 1. Overview of the Task Force. Progress ●We began by conducting an in-depth analysis of the FAIR4RS principles and identified six key categories where actionable instructions are needed, each with a series of outstanding questions (Fig. 2). ●Six subgroups are now conducting literature reviews and community outreach to answer these questions. ●Fig. 3 illustrates the approach and preliminary findings from the subgroup working on category C5, including a preliminary list of metadata elements we believe are essential for software reuse and ways to include that metadata with software. Join the Task Force! Email: [email protected] Find this poster and all related references here bit.ly/a-FAIR4RS www.researchsoft.org/tf-actionable-fair4rs ~12 active members Figure 2. Illustration of the outcomes of task 1 of the Task Force, which consisted of understanding the requirements of each of the 17 FAIR4RS principles. We identified 6 categories where actionable guidelines are needed Home of the Task Force Location: Germany, Spain, UK, USA, etc. Research domains: Biomedical, Data Science, Knowledge Representation, etc. 17 FAIR4RS principles 6 main categories Many questions! C1. Identifier C4. Qualified references C2. Metadata for software publication & discovery C5. Metadata for software reuse 17 FAIR4RS principles C3. Standards for inputs & outputs C6. License 2 FAIR4RS principles 2 main questions ●R1. Software is described with a plurality of accurate and relevant attributes ●R1.2. Software is associated with detailed provenance. ●What provenance and other metadata are necessary for software reuse? ●How to provide that metadata? Provenance metadata: ●Authors info ●Funding details Other metadata ●Software description ●Required dependencies How to provide: codemeta.json Methods Preliminary findings ●Literature review ●Personal assessment ●External feedback Next Steps ●Dec 2025: Subgroups complete investigations to establish answers for outstanding questions. ●Mar 2026: Release draft guidelines for broad community feedback. ●Summer 2026: Publish the first official version of the Actionable FAIR4RS Guidelines. ●Fall 2026: Transition to a maintained, living resource that evolves with community input. Get Involved! Are you a developer, maintainer, funder, or user of research software? Email [email protected] to join us and help build the foundation for FAIR research software!
