This article explains how to publish your research software.

WUR and funder requirements

WUR promotes transparency, collaboration, accessibility, and openness in science. As such, research software (like research data) should be as FAIR and open as possible, in line with the institutional recommendation ‘as open as possible and as closed as necessary’. In addition, some funders (e.g. NWO and ZonMW) require researchers to share software resulting from these projects as openly as possible. Projects funded via other means may not be required to share research software, but WUR encourages all researchers to openly share their research software when appropriate.

How to prepare your research software for publication?

When publishing your research software, make sure to at least add the following:

1. Make sure that there is a LICENCE.txt or LICENCE.md document in which it is clearly stated what (re)users are allowed to do with the software (i.e. the terms of use). There are multiple open software licences to choose from. For more information on licences, have a look at this knowledge article on choosing a licence for your research software.
2. Add documentation, a README.txt or README.md, to fully describe and explain your research software. For more information, have a look at this article << article software documentation >>.

How to publish your research software?

The most popular platform for hosting, collaborating, and making software projects publicly available is Git (GitHub and Gitlab). There is a WUR instance for GitLab known as Git@WUR. With Git@WUR, a researcher can execute version control, share code, manage and solve issues for code, document code, and share code privately, WUR-wide, or publicly. Researchers are free to use the web versions of GitLab and GitHub as well, but WUR does not offer repository-, account-, storage-, or access management, or other types of support for those web versions.

It is important to realise that GitHub, GitLab or Git@WUR do not assign persistent identifiers, e.g. a DOI. However, versions of Git repositories can be published in a data repository, as these do assign a persistent identifier. One way to get a DOI is by publishing the main branch from Git into a repository, such as Zenodo (see Referencing and citing content - GitHub Docs) or 4TU (see Software publishing made easier: An integration between 4TU.ResearchData and GitLab – 4TU.ResearchData). Additionally, it is strongly recommended that you register your software for increased visibility and findability.

Through software publishing, other researchers can cite your software in their preferred referencing database (e.g. BibTex or EndNote), just like citing a journal publication. By creating a CITATION.cff file (a Citation File Format) in each of your GitLab or GitHub repositories, others can easily transform or copy-paste the citation information into their manuscript, and/or cite your software correctly. You can create this .cff file with the online tool: cffinit.

Value creation

Whenever research software with potential commercial or utilisation value is created, it should be disclosed by completing a Software Disclosure Form (SDF) and Value Creation Form (VCF). More information can be found in the Guidelines on Value Creation with Software and Data in this knowledge article.

Support

Do you have any questions? Feel free to contact us at data@wur.nl.