Description
These research software sharing, publication, and distribution checklists were inspired by similar checklists produced by the imaging community and are intended to address a niche not addressed by existing similar resources such as guidance for creating research software management plans. They provide a tiered approach to completing the checklists with each item able to be completed at a different level:🥉Bronze,🥈Silver,🥇Gold, and 🏆 Platinum where bronze is highly attainable and platinum is going well above and beyond. With this approach I'm aiming to somewhat gamify the process as well as to provide aspirational goals and not just to set a minimum floor for compliance. The checklists are tailored based on a simple taxonomy of research software output types: 'records of specific analyses', 'web based services', 'software packages', and 'pipelines or workflows'. Each of these types of software output have overlapping but slightly different considerations for how best they can be shared, published, and distributed so each has its own checklist. Each checklist is comprised of items which address these 11 common themes: 📒 Source control, © Licencing, 📖 Documentation, 🔗 Making Citable, ✅ Testing, 🤖 Automation, 👥 Peer review / Code Review, 📦 Distribution, 💽 Environment Management / Portability, 🌱 Energy Efficiency, and ⚖ Governance, Conduct, and Continuity. The checklists are provided as simple markdown files making the checklists easy to include in a project repository like standard licenses and codes of conduct. Each theme includes its checkbox items and an expandable section which expands with advice, links, and resources on how to complete these checkboxes. There are repo badges to display the type of checklist, overall score, medal, and self vs. third party assessment. See rsspdc.org for more details.
