Introduction

Why do we need the RSMD guidelines?

The RSMD guidelines are a cross-disciplinary community driven effort to provide standardized and actionable guidance for the metadata collection and curation of research software. With the increasing importance of research software in academic research, it is necessary to ensure that software is archived, referenced, described and cited (ARDC) and that its metadata is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). The RSMD guidelines provide a framework for achieving these goals and facilitating the quality and sustainability of research software. Additionally, the guidelines can help stakeholders in the research community, such as researchers, software developers, research institutions, publishers, and infrastructure managers, identify requirements and best practices that are useful for their software.

Who is it for?

The RSMD guidelines are designed to be easily adapted to national communities, specialized disciplines or software driven communities to support efforts from research communities, research institutions and scholarly infrastructures to address their researchers or users needs. To assist software creators in self-archiving and self-metadata curation, an RSMD checklist is included in the Appendix B of this document. By using the checklist, software creators can ensure that their software has the necessary metadata to be easily discoverable and reusable.