Maria Levchenko

# Europe PMC joins the SoFAIR project {#europe-pmc-joins-the-sofair-project .wp-block-heading style="font-size:22px"}

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Modern science increasingly relies on software, from data collection and
analysis to modeling complex systems. As part of our
[mission](https://blog.europepmc.org/2024/02/moving-to-open-source.html),
Europe PMC integrates open access literature with research outputs, such
as data and software, to support innovation. To further this effort we
have joined forces with the [SoFAIR project](https://sofair.org/), a
collaborative initiative to empower reuse of open research software.

## Making software visible {#making-software-visible .wp-block-heading style="font-size:22px"}

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Today, software is an integral part of research, helping us advance
scientific discovery at an unprecedented rate. To ensure transparency
and reproducibility research software needs to be appropriately shared
and cited. Software citation practices are increasingly adopted by the
scientific community, but there are still hurdles to overcome. Code
associated with research articles is often absent from the reference
list and is not cited as a first-class bibliographic record. This makes
it difficult to discover and reuse existing research software and
results in lack of credit for research software developers.

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The SoFAIR project addresses this critical issue by connecting
publications with the software that was used, developed or shared in the
course of a research project. This helps ensure that research software
adheres to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable)
principles, initially designed for research data.

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The project relies on existing open infrastructure to:

1\. Identify research software within scholarly manuscripts;

2\. Assign persistent identifiers for software;

3\. Permanently archive the code.

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Mentions of research code in open access articles will be detected using
machine learning models and validated by publication authors. Software
citations identified in this project will be shared through the [Europe
PMC Annotations
platform](https://blog.europepmc.org/2019/06/submission-system-for-text-mined-annotations.html).
Similar to data citations, software citations will be available through
the Europe PMC [Annotations API](https://europepmc.org/AnnotationsApi).

![](https://lh7-us.googleusercontent.com/8GzfiGLyhIH-KTxZL3MgemwVMY2fvB-37f_ISL5dpAg8XHejdd2ZyMoVNHNVDtPrHa-_qtdi5Wjv2vUXMsB8ytM2Ccy8JE4Ed5FWSa-5bJdaS9BRqO3Lu3VghuxPPKKY-hN9M3UgEva931IJNUbR8A){decoding="async"
loading="lazy" width="694" height="553"}

We believe that the work that goes into developing and maintaining
research software needs to be recognised. Registering persistent
identifiers for software makes it easily citable and helps give credit
where it's due. We hope that SoFAIR will deliver the necessary
step-change in the way research software is identified, validated,
registered and archived for the long term.

## Participating institutions {#participating-institutions .wp-block-heading style="font-size:22px"}

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SoFAIR is a €499,000 international collaboration awarded through the
CHISTERA [Open Research Data & Software
Call](https://www.chistera.eu/projects-call-ord). It is coordinated by
[The Open University](https://www.open.ac.uk/), in conjunction with
[Inria](https://www.inria.fr/en); [Brno University of
Technology](https://www.vut.cz/en/); the Institute for Literary Research
of the Polish Academy of Sciences
([IBL-PAN](https://ibl.waw.pl/en/start)); and the European Molecular
Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute
([EMBL-EBI](https://www.ebi.ac.uk/)), which operates Europe PMC.

![](https://lh7-us.googleusercontent.com/yND7djb2uc5BRKA88EDAybfKD8LP3P5oWCv154Fd2kLUo8dOfg5JcOju06mM1m3H2QV2ybmLrz6IU571Dwyb7lAMDtJN7R0Y-lSC-aT56csTKoajDIFqSujsmA2K8VdH53jVW-Gz1Othkk2L6scG1A){decoding="async"
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For more information, please visit the [SoFAIR project
website](https://sofair.org/) and official [social media
accounts](https://twitter.com/SoFairOA).


Europe PMC joins the SoFAIR project   Modern science increasingly relies on software, from data collection and analysis to modeling complex systems. As part of our mission, Europe PMC integrates open access literature with research outputs, such as data and software, to support innovation. To further this effort we have joined forces with the SoFAIR project, a collaborative initiative to empower reuse of open research software.

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Connecting publications and software