HERMES: Easing the path to FAIR software publications

Abstract

Researchers are required to publish research outcomes; for RSEs this means publishing software. In this talk we present an open source software toolchain that helps researchers publish software automatically, with rich descriptive metadata. Only these rich metadata can make software publications truly FAIR, and support correct software citation to unlock academic credit. The toolchain can be plugged into continuous integration (CI) systems to harvest existing metadata from source code repositories and connected platforms. Metadata are processed, collated and presented for curation to prepare for automatic submission to publication repositories that provide PIDs (e.g. DOIs) for every software version. This saves RSEs arduous manual labour. The talk will outline our concept, describe the current state of development, detail the CI and publication platforms it works with and the documentation and training materials we develop, and give an outlook on sustainability and future development.