Program information#

The program is designed as an active learning experience during which you will work on your research software project.

First, you will follow a Code Refinery workshop. In this workshop, you will become familiar with tools and best practices for scientific software development. This course will not teach a programming language, but will teach you the tools you need to do programming well and avoid common inefficiency traps. The tools you learn are practically a requirement for any scientist who needs to write code. The main focus is on using Git for efficiently writing and maintaining research software.

Next, during weekly 2-hour seminars, you will work on applying these tools and practices to your own research project through short assignments and active discussion, supported by members of the TU Delft Digital Competence Centre. Each week, we will focus on a specific topic covered during the Code Refinery workshop. The program is concluded with a short presentation during which you can share your progress and results.

Background and motivation#

The concept of FAIR originated in the Netherlands during the 2014 Lorentz Workshop “Jointly Designing a Data FAIRport”, where participants formulated the FAIR data vision to optimize datasharing and reuse by humans and machines. The ultimate goal of FAIR is to increase the transparency, reproducibility, and reusability of research. For this to apply to software, developed research software needs to be well-described (by metadata), inspectable, documented and appropriately structured so that it can be executed, replicated, built-upon, combined, reinterpreted, reimplemented, and/or used in different settings. The FAIR4RS Principles aim to guide software creators and owners on how to make their software FAIR.[1]

Various efforts have been undertaken to translate the FAIR principles into practical guidelines and practices for researchers. As the topic is still relatively new, no consensus has been reached on (minimum) implementation requirements. Currently, the TU Delft offers training courses (Software Carpentries and Code Refineries) to teach core digital competences on developing research software. However, researchers often struggle in translating the (general) lessons to their own research project.

The FAIR for Research Software program is a pilot to bridge the gap between learning and applying the FAIR principles to research software.

With this pilot program, we aim to

  • Transfer knowledge about FAIR principles for research software to TU Delft researchers

  • Support researchers in applying these principles to their software projects

  • Evaluate the effectiveness of a workshop series on the adoption of FAIR4RS

  • Evaluate the scalability of a workshop series to adopt FAIR4RS