Raising the Profile of Research Software: Recommendations for Funding Agencies and Research Institutions in the Netherlands

Research software is fundamental to today’s research, yet it does not receive the recognition it deserves. For example, research software is not yet adequately recognised in the scholarly record through citation. This situation contrasts starkly with the fact that open science and reproducible research is given ample attention at the policy level. We argue that if at the policy and institute level, everyone is convinced that open science leads towards better, more transparent and reproducible research, then visible and practical steps forward should be made that ensure that research software is treated on equal footing with publications and research data. In this paper, we present a concrete follow-up to the Declaration of Research Assessment (DORA) in the form of recommendations for raising the profile of research software. These recommendations provide steps for achieving recognition for research software as a fundamental and vital component of research. This paper focuses on the Netherlands, but the issues and recommendations could be adapted and adopted elsewhere. We divide our recommendations into four categories: Software availability and quality, Software sustainability, Training, and Human capital.