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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: EP/Y036352/1
Title: Making Software FAIR: A machine-assisted workflow for the research software lifecycle
Principal Investigator: Knoth, Professor P
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Dr D Pride
Project Partners:
Department: Faculty of Sci, Tech, Eng & Maths (STEM)
Organisation: The Open University
Scheme: Standard Research - NR1
Starts: 01 January 2024 Ends: 31 December 2025 Value (£): 123,187
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Artificial Intelligence Software Engineering
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Information Technologies
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
A key issue hindering the discoverability, attribution and reusability of open research software is that its existence often remains hidden within the manuscript of research papers. For these resources to become first-class bibliographic records, they first need to be identified and subsequently registered with persistent identifiers (PIDs) to be made FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). To this day, much open research software fails to meet FAIR principles and software resources are mostly not explicitly linked from the manuscripts that introduced them or used them.This project will extend the capabilities of critical and widely used open scholarly infrastructures (CORE,Software Heritage, HAL) and tools (GROBID) operated by the consortium partners, delivering and deploying an effective solution for the management of the research software lifecycle, including: 1)ML-assisted identification of research software assets from within the manuscripts of scholarly papers, 2)validation of the identified assets by authors, 3) registration of software assets with PIDs and their archival. The solution will be optimised for deployment over open content available through the global network of open repositories aggregated by CORE (core.ac.uk), which constitutes with over 32 million full texts and250m+ metadata records from over 10k repositories currently the world's largest collection of open access documents. Our ML software for extraction and disambiguation of software assets will be realised as an extension of the state-of-the-art GROBID tool. We will build on established protocols, such as asOpenAIRE Guidelines v4.0, RIOXX v3 and Codemeta, to encode information about software assets and their links to research manuscripts establishing an interoperable and extensible workflow connecting open repositories (represented by HAL), aggregators (represented by CORE) and software archives(represented by Software Heritage). The efficacy of the developed tools and workflow will be validated in three use cases: 1) a life sciences demonstrator (for Europe PMC), 2) a multi-disciplinary demonstrator for institutional repositories (represented by HAL) and a 3) digital humanities case study (with links to DARIAH and EOSC).
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Summary
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