Key takeaways from the 2nd ask me anything webinar: Sharing and discovering research software through EOSC

The 2nd ‘ask me anything’ session examined the merits of sharing and discovering research software as a valuable output and looked at 2 platforms available via EOSC.

These days, research outcomes are not just represented by traditional articles or publications, but by other types of research outputs such as data, code and software. Research software and code can be developed within research projects and/or used for analysis. In many cases, software is reused and improved in collaboration and crowd research initiatives (e.g. citizen science, hackathons).

What is the EOSC portal offering to help researchers share and discover research software? The 1 March ‘ask me anything’ session set out to answer this very question.

Access to services via EOSC

At a glance, the EOSC marketplace provides a gateway for easily accessing software tools used during the research workflow. In this sense, it helps to enable and increase the sharing and discovery of software among researchers in different communities. 

Via the portal, it is possible to find specific services related to:

• software libraries
• repositories
• platforms
• and more.

For a live demonstration of this, you can also consult a demo prepared by Dr Anne Fouilloux of the Department of Geosciences at the University of Oslo.

EOSC software platform: Uses & benefits

The EOSC marketplace offers a catalogue of services that can enhance the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability (FAIR) of software.

The software platform in the EOSC marketplace can improve the sharing and discovery software, with the following benefits:

• making software visible as unique ‘research products’, as is the case for traditional research outputs (e.g. publications, research data)
• improving the overall reproducibility of research by sharing all elements of an experiment, e.g., data, software and services
• enhancing the discoverability and reusability of software as a research product through their presence on the EOSC marketplace and related services.

In practice: 2 platforms

OpenAIRE CONNECT

OpenAIRE CONNECT offers research communities the possibility to manage and access a ‘community gateway’. Gateways are community-driven portals for sharing, discovering and interlinking research products of any type, like software, articles and data, together with their relationships to projects, organisations, countries and research fields. 

Gateways are useful for any research network to assess and reward community research efforts, interlink different types of research products, enhance their findability, accessibility and reusability. Gateways also enable the monitoring of the uptake of open science practices, providing stats on impact, FAIRness, openness and publishing trends.

Researchers can use OpenAIRE CONNECT to:

• facilitate access and reuse software
• discover research software developed by other researchers
• uncover funding information, publications and data related to a particular research software, enabling a view of the research in its full context
• find thematic repositories for the deposition of software such as thematic communities on Zenodo, an Open Access repository also integrated with GitHub.

WeNMR and application portals

WeNMR is a Virtual Research Community (VRC), one of many supported by EGI. From a technical perspective, it provides biomedical scientists with a portfolio of portals for the study of molecular forces and biomolecular interactions to improve drug design, treatments and diagnostics. WeNMR VRC has been in production for 10 years under various projects, including: eNMR, WeNMR, EGI-Engage, West-Life and EOSC-hub and, as of January 2021, the operation of the VRC is supported by the EGI-ACE project.

A variety of WeNMR services are available via the EOSC portal. One of these is HADDOCK, a software developed by the University of Utrecht to model the drug-target docking, particularly modelling various Sars-Cov-2 human protein interactions.

Next steps

All of the software platforms mentioned above, and during the session, can be found on the EOSC marketplace. If you have a data storage service that could be interesting for other users, you can easily onboard it to the portal (check the EOSC providers portal).

For more information, watch the entire ask me anything webinar on software.

Last but not least, if you are interested in  computing resources, do not miss the next ‘ask me anything’ webinar organised by EOSC Future on 5 April at 14.00 CET.

Registration is open: https://eoscfuture.eu/eventsfuture/ask-me-anything-session-3-compute/