Software publications with rich metadata: state of the art, automated workflows and HERMES concept
This addresses the problem of inefficient software publication for researchers and institutions aiming to meet FAIR principles, though it is incremental as it builds on existing CI solutions and metadata standards.
The paper tackles the tedious, manual process of publishing research software by developing HERMES, an automated workflow that retrieves and processes metadata from source repositories to publish software with rich metadata, advancing the state of the art in this area.
To satisfy the principles of FAIR software, software sustainability and software citation, research software must be formally published. Publication repositories make this possible and provide published software versions with unique and persistent identifiers. However, software publication is still a tedious, mostly manual process. To streamline software publication, HERMES, a project funded by the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration, develops automated workflows to publish research software with rich metadata. The tooling developed by the project utilizes continuous integration solutions to retrieve, collate, and process existing metadata in source repositories, and publish them on publication repositories, including checks against existing metadata requirements. To accompany the tooling and enable researchers to easily reuse it, the project also provides comprehensive documentation and templates for widely used CI solutions. In this paper, we outline the concept for these workflows, and describe how our solution advance the state of the art in research software publication.