This is a summary of a SORSE discussion session, presented by:
- Mark Woodbridge, Imperial College London
- Vanessa Sochat, Stanford University
- Jurriaan Spaaks, Netherlands eScience Center
And featuring contributions from:
- Malin Sandström, INCF
- Alexander Struck, Humboldt University of Berlin
Introduction
The discussion session “Research Software Directories: What, Why, and How?” was held on September 16 during SORSE, an International Series of Online Research Software Events. As presenters, we each shared efforts to develop and maintain software directories: catalogues to showcase the software outputs of an institution or community. The directories presented were:
- The Research Software Directory developed by the Netherlands eScience Center (GitHub)
- Imperial College London’s Research Software Directory (GitHub)
- The Research Software Encyclopedia
- GitHub Search as a template for an individual or institution
Each of the above offered several advantages and disadvantages, or were scoped for particular use cases. For example, research-software.nl provides a robust application for serving detailed metrics and metadata for software, however it requires more manual entry. The Research Software Encyclopedia is automated and does not require hosting, but it lacks the same level of metadata. The Imperial College London and GitHub Search research software directories offer much quicker to deploy solutions, but might be too simple for some use cases. The directories are discussed in detail in the following sections. In addition to this set, we suggest the reader take a look at the Awesome Registries list to find additional examples.