Work on different aspects of adopting best practices

[tmorrell]

Software registries will work on adopting the best practices from https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.13117

[ASCLnet]

Herve is interested in working on this, too.

Ideas:

• How to implement the best practices on our resources.
• Look at the different Privacy engines to see which work well; build your own privacy policy
• Write a scope statement for your resource and get feedback on it
• Determine how to reveal your metadata schema when 1.) it is a standard format; and 2.) it is a custom format
• Write a retention policy, perhaps using others as an example.

[ASCLnet]

My inclination is to start this at 9 AM EST (UTC 14:00), to run until 17:00 UTC, and, if people on the West Coast/in Hawaii/Australia want to join in (which I encourage!), hold a second session at 6 PM EST (23:00 UTC).

[ASCLnet]

Best Practices: https://scicodes.net/best-practices-for-software-registries-and-repositories/
Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89352708891?pwd=WnVCZDlvYlMyM2VxQmhTaW5kWFNlZz09

[mrittmancr]

Here's a summary from the discussion earlier. We identified a few areas to look at in the best practices:

1. Provide a public API with documentation on how to make queries.

Those who want to access software metadata need to know how they can do so in a machine-readable way.

2. Choose one (or possible 2-3) schema and make data available in that format.

Providing a public schema is ok, but the data is much easier to use when presented in a standard format.

3. Assign an identifier to each piece of software. It's recommended that an interoperable, persistent identifier is used.

For the purposes of software citation, it's much easier to be able to refer to an identifier than needing to use additional metadata. https://fairsharing.org uses a combinations of identfiers and update date to uniquely identify versions of its records.

4. Consider how to expand the list of required fields in the best practices.

Software license came top of the list. We felt there wasn't too much risk of this going out of data because a) it rarely changes b) for many software repositories, finding the license could be automated rather than requiring the authors to provide it.

To prioritize other fields, consider surveying stakeholders - including those running software repositories and registries, and consumers of software metadata - to see which fields they consider most important.