Last week saw CORE founder Professor Petr Knoth at UNESCO in Paris for the 2025 Software Heritage Symposium and summit. Professor Knoth was presenting the work undertaken in the first year of the SoFAIR project, a two-year multinational CHIST-ERA project. The Open University is working in conjunction with multiple partners including INRIA, Brno University of Technology, the Polish Academy of Sciences and Europe PMC. SoFAIR will improve and semi-automate the process for identifying, describing, registering and archiving research software, ensuring it has received a Software Heritage persistent identifier.
This project will extend the capabilities of critical and widely used open scholarly infrastructures (CORE, Software Heritage, HAL) delivering and deploying an effective solution for the management of the research software lifecycle, including machine-learning assisted identification of research software assets from within the manuscripts of scholarly papers indexed by CORE. Second, the validation of the identified assets by authors can be managed by repository managers via the CORE Repository Dashboard and finally the discovered software is then registered and archived within Software Heritage.
Professor Knoth said;
“The SoFAIR Project builds on the existing skills and infrastructures of the project partners and can help deliver a real shift in how research software is both valued and curated. Ensuring the availability of research software and implicitly linking it to the research paper that introduced it is a key pillar in addressing the current reproducibility crisis in many scientific domains.”
You can read the latest results from the project on the SoFAIR website.