Nine Best Practices for Research Software Registries and Repositories: A Concise Guide

Understand

Scientific software registries and repositories serve various roles in their respective disciplines.

• These resources improve software discoverability and research transparency, provide information for software citations, and foster preservation of computational methods that might otherwise be lost over time, thereby supporting research reproducibility and replicability.
• However, developing these resources takes effort, and few guidelines are available to help prospective creators of registries and repositories.
• To address this need, we present a set of nine best practices that can help managers define the scope, practices, and rules that govern individual registries and repositories.