The final SoFAIR webinar, held online on 11 December 2025, presented the goals, methodology, and outcomes of the SoFAIR project (Making Software FAIR: A machine-assisted workflow for the research software lifecycle). SoFAIR is a two-year CHIST-ERA funded project, led by The Open University, and involving six partners across four countries.
The SoFAIR project partners
The project’s overarching goal is addressing persistent challenges in research software discoverability, attribution, and long-term preservation. Research software is frequently mentioned only implicitly in scholarly articles, preventing it from becoming a first-class, FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) research object.
The outcomes from the SoFAIR project include a scalable, machine-assisted workflow that automatically identifies software mentions in full-text articles, and then provides a mechanism for author validation of these mentions. CORE, as a nexus for the global repositories network, is ideally placed to extract these mentions and then route the author validation requests to the relevant repository via a module in the CORE dashboard. Further, once validated, the software metadata is linked to the paper’s metadata and the software is archived by Software Heritage (one of the project partners), and a permanent identifier is generated.
SoFAIR builds on existing standards and repository practices, notably the COAR Notify protocol which is the communication link between each of the SoFAIR modules. This ensures the outputs of the SoFAIR project are extensible and can be integrated into repository systems in a number of different ways. Some of these were covered during the webinar which showcased three use cases that have been completed during the lifespan of the project; EuropePMC is integrating software mentions generated as part of the SoFAIR project and including these mentions in the metadata of published articles. The HAL Open Science repository developed a ‘short loop’ for authors within the HAL ecosystem, allowing for the validation of software mentions within the HAL repository platform itself. Finally CORE worked closely with Software Heritage to make sure that software mentions are shared widely in the research graph, promoting deposit and help tracking connections between research software and the papers which first introduced it.
The project workflow has been publicly released in the form of documentation, software and data via the SoFAIR project’s website and workflow and solution documentation pages and the project’s Github repository.
The webinar also included a panel discussion and we’re extremely grateful to our panel members; Arfon Smith – Schmitt Sciences, Kathleen Sheerer – Executive Director of COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) and John Salter, Research Library Technician at White Rose Libraries, University of Leeds. The discussion brought together perspectives spanning research infrastructure coordination, repository operations, and policy-level stewardship. Chaired by Professor Petr Knoth (CORE, The Open University), the discussion was framed around the practical and cultural conditions required to make research software genuinely reusable and trustworthy.
You can watch a recording of the webinar on the CORE Youtube channel.
If you have any questions about CORE or SoFAIR please get in touch at theteam@core.ac.uk
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