On behalf of a number of software developers, end-users, publishers associated with the scientific analysis community, we would like to invite all of you to review a document generated as a result of a NIH BD2K supported meeting that focused on the opportunities and challenges of developing a software management ecosystem that could be valuable for finding and linking software, publications and users in the research community. You may be also be aware of a related project, the Data Discovery Index, which will be fully integrated with the software system.
The product of this workshop and the subsequent discussion is a document which details the opportunities and challenges of developing a Software Discovery Index that would enable researchers to find, cite, and link software and analysis tools publications and researchers. To ensure that the opportunities, challenges, and recommendations detailed in the document reflect the breadth of experience from the community, we are seeking your input. In conjunction with related efforts already under way at NIH, including the development of a Data Discovery Index, the final document will be used by the NIH Office of the Associate Director (ADDS) to inform a strategy for the development of a Software Discovery Index and a commons ecosystem for data, software, and resources.
We need your help to ensure that this critical task is achieved: to guide the development of a community based system that gives credit and acknowledgment to the builder and maintainers of the software we all depend on! We invite all users, software developers, publishers, and software repository administrators to review our report prior to its submission to the NIH. Please complete your review and post comments by November 1, 2014.
The link to the report is here.
On behalf of the organizing committee, thank you for your assistance!
Organizing Committee
Owen White
Director of Bioinformatics, University of Maryland, Baltimore, School of Medicine
Co-Chair of NIH BD2K Software Index Workshop
Asif Dhar
Principal & Chief Medical Informatics Officer
Co-Chair of NIH BD2K Software Index Workshop
Vivien Bonazzi
Senior Advisor for Data Science Technologies (ADDS)
Co-Chair of BD2K Software and Methods Group
Jennifer Couch
Chief, Structural Biology and Molecular Applications Branch
NCI Co-Chair of BD2K Software and Methods Group
Chris Wellington
Program Director (NHGRI)
It appears the domain name registration has expired. This is a valuable report that contained important additional insight in the comments section. Has this been preserved anywhere?
We are working to either re-open the site and/or move it to a more permanent home. The goal is, as you suggest, to preserve both the document and the comments. Thanks for the great comment. Once completed, I'll update this thread with more details.
The report is mostly at https://web.archive.org/web/20141207053849/http://softwarediscoveryindex.org/report/ (but the graphics are not - perhaps a different crawl saved some of the images?}
The original URL has been restored.
After that meeting report came out and the request for comments posted, I made a copy of the report in PDF format. It preserved all the content including images and comments posted by people on the web page. I've uploaded this PDF to https://gist.github.com/mhucka/44921ea1e9a01697dbd0591d872b7b22. Beware that the PDF has many pages and the GitHub interface will render the PDF in your browser, so the page view will be a little slow. Also, my notes indicate that I made the snapshot on October 26, 2014, which is slightly before the November 1, 2014, deadline for comments. Therefore, this copy may lack some comments if there were comments posted after October 26.
A Gtihub gist is perhaps not the best location for archival purposes, but since I'm not a co-author of that report, it felt wrong to post it under my name somewhere such as Figshare or in my institution's repository. If people can recommend a better place to store it, please let me know!