{"id":988,"date":"2014-10-03T09:00:55","date_gmt":"2014-10-03T16:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mozscienceblog.wpengine.com\/?p=988"},"modified":"2014-10-03T09:00:55","modified_gmt":"2014-10-03T16:00:55","slug":"code-as-as-research-object-new-phase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/mozilla-science\/code-as-as-research-object-new-phase\/","title":{"rendered":"Code as a research object: (new phase) standardizing software metadata"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the Science Lab, we want to help research thrive on the open web. Part of this is working with other community members to build technical prototypes that move science on the web forward. Earlier this year we saw several<\/a> prototypes<\/a> come out of the ‘Code as a Research Object’ collaboration. Since then, there’s been more conversation and effort in this space and we wanted to share our progress and invite the community to give input.<\/p>\n

First, a quick look at ‘Code as a Research Object’<\/h2>\n

Late last year, “Code as a Research Object” was first announced<\/a> as a new collaboration between the Science Lab, GitHub<\/a>, figshare<\/strong><\/a> and Zenodo<\/a> to help explore how to better integrate code and scientific software into the scholarly workflow. Since then, we’ve seen community members come together to build prototypes<\/a> allowing users to easily get a DOI for their code, making it citable and easier to incorporate into the existing credit system. <\/p>\n

Next Steps: Standardizing Metadata<\/h2>\n
\n\"At
\nNCEAS Open Science CodeFest, September 2014<\/small>\n<\/div>\n

Coming into the conversation, there’s still room for best practices for code reuse and citation. In particular, some form of standardized metadata would help other repositories understand how they can integrate with current systems.<\/p>\n

\n\"At
\nMatt Jones at OSCodeFest, September 2014<\/small>\n<\/div>\n

When I was at NCEAS Open Science CodeFest<\/a> (OSCodeFest) last month, I led a discussion around the work being done here. I was joined by Matt Jones<\/a>, Carly Strasser<\/a> and Corinna Gries<\/a>, and we agreed that some standards need to be set to help more groups store software in a citable and interoperable manner.<\/p>\n

Building on the existing<\/a> discussions<\/a> and proposals<\/a> in the community, we compared the exiting schemas for code storage to help create a metadata standard that allows for discoverability<\/strong>, reuse<\/strong> and citation<\/strong>. You can see the notes from our discussion here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This led to the creation of the codemeta GitHub repo<\/a> to store a minimal metadata schema for science software in code in JSON-LD and XML. Since then, we’ve worked on refining the proposed metadata schema and creating mappings between some existing popular data stores. Coming soon: Matt Jones will be blogging on some of the more technical aspects of this project.<\/p>\n

How to get involved<\/h2>\n

We’re looking for feedback on our current proposed metadata schema for code discovery, reuse and citation. <\/p>\n