Progress on Software Management Plans in the Netherlands

I’m very pleased to see that the Netherlands group working on “Software Management Plans: Towards national guidelines” has released a draft set of guidelines for community consultation (through 20 June 2022) and is organizing a workshop on 9 June to test and discuss the guidelines with use cases from the research community: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/software-that-makes-you-proud-using-smps-tickets-341888165707.

As I wrote in 2016 following my 4-year term of working as a program officer at NSF, I believe that Data and Software Management Plans must be public and should be machine-readable. In that post, I recommended that:

The science community (reviewers and program officers) needs to thoughtfully consider, at all stages of proposal review and project management, the public interest and NSF's requirement that investigators and organizations have the responsibility as members of the scientific and engineering community to make results, data, and collections available to other researchers.

Software and data management plans should be public documents, stored as archival documents like papers, software, or datasets, so the record of what projects planned can be later verified by other scientists, including peer-reviewers of future projects by the same investigators.

In the next week, I plan to go through the draft guidelines to consider how they would effect the changes I want to see:

1. Software that is produced has a plan for how it will be maintained over time so that others can use it, for reproducibility and for new work.
2. The Software Management Plan (SMP) includes a minimum time limit for the maintenance that will be performed.
3. The SMP includes the source of resources to perform this maintenance.
4. The guidelines encourage open source software, but do not strictly require it, as this needs to be balanced with other goals.
5. New software is not developed when it would be more cost-efficient and better for the overall community to contribute to already-existing software.
6. Software management plans are made public and machine readable, so that they can be referenced and it is easy to verify if they are being carried out.

If you are interested in research software, I urge you to also consider and comment on these draft guidelines by 20 June 2022.

This post has also been published as https://doi.org/10.59350/vbckt-8gr70 on the Rouge Scholar.