Awareness of FAIR and FAIR4RS among international research software funders

Research software has become indispensable in contemporary research and is now viewed as essential infrastructure in many scholarly fields. Encompassing source code, algorithms, scripts, computational workflows, and executables generated during or specifically for research, it plays a critical role in advancing scholarly knowledge. The research software field includes considerable open-source use and links to the broader open science movement. In this context, it has been argued that the well-established FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles for research data should be adapted for research software under the label FAIR4RS. However, the level of uptake of FAIR4RS principles is unclear. To gauge FAIR4RS’s status, international research funders involved in supporting research software (n = 36) were surveyed about their awareness of the concept. The survey reveals much greater familiarity with the more established FAIR principles for data (73% ‘extremely familiar’) than FAIR4RS (33% ‘extremely familiar’). Nevertheless, there is still considerable recognition of the relatively new FAIR4RS concept, a significant achievement for efforts to extend open science policies and practices to encompass research software.