RLUK19 | Research software: a role for libraries - British Library
Channel: ResearchLibrariesUK
Date: 2019-05-24

http://rlukconference.com/

Research software: a role for libraries - Jez Cope and Torsten Reimer, British Library.

This paper discusses the role that might be played by institutional and national libraries to integrate software into the scholarly communications landscape. Recent years have seen many developments in the realm of scholarly communication. Open access to publications and data are slowly becoming accepted parts of the landscape, and both researchers and those who support them are, quite reasonably, asking how these sometimes disconnected efforts fit into the bigger picture: is there a coherent story about how research is being improved?

A desire to “do things right” and increase trust in the research process is one such story. Frequently framed as reproducibility in STEM disciplines, or simply as transparency in Arts & Humanities, this viewpoint sees openness as a fundamental value of academic research. Research is not done purely for private gain but to increase the stock of human knowledge. This context brings a number of other common research artefacts into the scope of “scholarly communication”, including research software, the software written and used to generate, process and analyse research conclusions.